'Beware the Internet’s Looming Class Divide As the web reshapes our minds and souls, we have to fight to keep itequally open
by Johann Hari
When I was a child, not so long ago, there was a BBC television
programme called Tomorrow’s World. Every week, presenters would show
us fantastical pieces of technology that would, in The Distant
Future, remake the world. A telephone you could carry everywhere, in
a little briefcase of its own! A special machine that would tell
drivers where they were and supply directions in a smooth, soft
voice! Computers all wired together that could communicate across
long distances and contain reams of information for all to see!
Now we all live in an episode of Tomorrow’s World, faster than we
could possibly have imagined. It is easy - and a little trite - to
gush with Panglossian glee about the internet. But, still. Today,
anyone with a laptop and an internet connection has access to a
heftier chunk of humanity’s knowledge than the most privileged
visitor to the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BC,
or the British Library reading room just a generation ago. Want
George Eliot’s novels, Einstein’s scientific papers or Paris Hilton’s
genitals? Just click here.
It is hard not to feel dizzy at the bizarre new connections of ideas
and people and money suddenly surging across continents. I have a gay
Muslim friend, for example, who spends all day talking to Israeli
soldiers on webcams, partly for aesthetic reasons and partly to
persuade them to leave the West Bank. That conversation - and tens of
millions even odder still - would have been impossible five years
ago. Today, you can almost feel broadband cables hum with them.
It is increasingly clear that the internet is going to be a
transformative moment in human history as significant as the printing
press. In 1450, a decade after Johannes Gutenberg invented it, even
the most astute watchers could have only begun to squint at the
changes it would spur. In time, it made popular nationalism possible,
because linguistic communities could communicate with each other
independently, in one language, and form a sense of community. It
dissolved the medieval stranglehold of information held by the
churches and Kings, making it possible for individuals to read the
Bible for themselves - and to reject violently the readings used by
authority to strengthen its rule. Communications technologies rewire
our brains; they make us into a different species.
A decade after the invention of the internet, can we too squint at
the changes it is bringing? Just as the printing press made it
possible for national groups to bond together, the internet makes it
possible for pan-national groups to see themselves as one. Oddly, the
first group to grasp this ultra-modern potential proprly have been
people who pine for the moral strictures of the seventh century
desert: radical Islamists.
Thirty years ago, a Muslim lad in Leeds suffering from second-
generation blues, who thought he had more in common with a teenager
in Gaza or Baghdad or Grozny than with a non-Muslim up the road,
would have been very odd. Today, it’s not so implausible: he can
spend all day speaking to those teenagers on Skype, watching videos
of atrocities against them, and dreaming of hellish atrocities of his
own.
Al-Qa’ida is increasingly shaped like the internet, with no centre,
just thousands of connecting cables at the perimeter, because it is
increasingly a product of the internet. Other new identities - ones
we can’t guess at yet - will burgeon online.'
Geen opmerkingen:
Een reactie posten