A couple of years or so ago
I was a guest on Start The Week, and
I was authoritatively informed by a very distinguished journalist that
the
whole Internet thing was just a silly fad like ham radio in the
fifties, and that
if I thought any different I was really a bit naïve. It is a very
British trait
– natural, perhaps, for a country, which has lost an empire and found
Mr.
Blobby – to be so suspicious of change.
But the change is real. I
don’t think anybody would argue now that the Internet isn’t becoming a
major
factor in our lives. However, it’s very new to us. Newsreaders still
feel it is
worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime
was
planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention
when
criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans
‘over a
cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their
day.
Then there’s the peculiar
way in which certain BBC presenters and journalists (yes, Humphrys
Senior, I’m looking at you) pronounce Internet addresses. It goes ‘www dot
… bbcdot…
co dot… ukslash
… today slash …’
etc., and carries the implication that they have no
idea what any of this new-fangled stuff is about, but that you lot out
there will
probably know what it means.
I suppose earlier
generations had to sit through all this huffing and puffing with the
invention
of television, the phone, cinema, radio, the car, the bicycle,
printing, the
wheel and so on, but you would think we would learn the way these
things work,
which is this:
(1) everything
that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
(2) anything
that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is
incredibly
exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
(3) anything
that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of
things
and the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it until it’s
been
around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright
really.
Apply this list to movies,
rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you
are.
This subjective view plays
odd tricks on us, of course. For instance, ‘interactivity’ is one of
those
neologisms that Mr. Humphrys likes to
dangle between
a pair of verbal tweezers, but the reason we suddenly need such a word
is that
during this century we have for the first time been dominated by
non-interactive forms of entertainment: cinema, radio, recorded music
and
television. Before they came along all entertainment was interactive:
theatre,
music, sport – the performers and audience were there together, and
even
a respectfully silent audience exerted a powerful shaping presence on
the
unfolding of whatever drama they were there for. We didn’t need a
special word
for interactivity in the same way that we don’t (yet) need a special
word for
people with only one head.
I expect that history will
show ‘normal’ mainstream twentieth century media to be the aberration
in all
this. ‘Please, Miss, you mean they could
only just sit there and watch? They couldn’t do anything? Didn’t
everybody feel
terribly isolated or alienated or ignored?’
‘Yes, child,
that’s why they all went mad. Before the Restoration.’
‘What was the
Restoration again, please, Miss?’
‘The end of the twentieth century, child. When we
started to get interactivity
back.’
Because the Internet is so
new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a
type of
publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So
people
complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that Americans
dominate it
and you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine
trying to
apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of
course you
can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can
‘trust’ what
people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants. Working
out the social politics of who you can
trust and why
is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to
do.
For some batty reason we turn off this natural skepticism when we see
things in
any medium, which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in
which,
we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite.
Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should
concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on
trust
– of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever
got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the
newspapers or saw
on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist
would
ever make. One of the most important things you learn from the Internet
is that
there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s
just an awful lot of ‘us’.
Of course, there’s a great
deal wrong with the Internet. For one thing, only a minute proportion
of the
world’s population is so far connected. [This
was written in 1999. Only ten years later we have 1,4 billion people on
the
web, m.s.] I
recently heard some pundit on the radio arguing that the internet would
always
be just another unbridgeable gulf between the rich and the poor for the
following reasons – that computers would always be expensive in
themselves, that you had to buy lots of extras like modems, and you had
to keep
upgrading your software. The list sounds impressive but doesn’t stand
up to a
moment’s scrutiny. The cost of powerful computers, which used to be
around the
level of jet aircraft, is now down amongst the color television sets
and still
dropping like a stone. Modems these days are mostly built-in, and
standalone
models have become such cheap commodities that companies, like Hayes,
whose
sole business was manufacturing them are beginning to go bust. Internet
software from Microsoft or Netscape is famously free. Phone charges in
the UK
are still high but dropping. In the US local calls are free. In other
words the
cost of connection is rapidly approaching zero, and for a very simple
reason: the
value of the web increases with every single additional person who
joins it.
It’s in everybody’s interest for costs to keep dropping closer and
closer to
nothing until every last person on the planet is connected.
Another problem with the
net is that it’s still ‘technology’, and ‘technology’, as the computer
scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined
it, is ‘stuff that doesn’t work yet.’ We no
longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs.
But
there was a time when we hadn’t worked out how many legs chairs should
have,
how tall they should be, and they would often ‘crash’ when we tried to
use
them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs
(and a
couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of
sand) and
we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I’m sure we will look
back on
this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we
were doing
with them for ‘productivity.’
But the biggest problem is
that we are still the first generation of users, and for all that we
may have
invented the net, we still don’t really get it. In ‘The
Language Instinct’, Stephen Pinker explains the generational
difference between pidgin and creole
languages. A
pidgin language is what you get when you put together a bunch of people
–
typically slaves – who have already grown up with their own language
but
don’t know each others.’ They manage to cobble together a rough and
ready lingo
made up of bits of each. It lets them get on with things, but has
almost no
grammatical structure at all.
However, the first
generation of children born to the community takes these fractured
lumps of language
and transforms them into something new, with a rich and organic grammar
and
vocabulary, which is what we call a Creole. Grammar is just a natural
function
of children’s brains, and they apply it to whatever they find.
The same thing is happening
in communication technology. Most of us are stumbling along in a kind
of pidgin
version of it, squinting myopically at things the size of fridges on
our desks,
not quite understanding where email goes, and cursing at the beeps of
mobile
phones. Our children, however, are doing something completely
different. Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone
Corporation quoted in Wired
Magazine, describes the extraordinary behavior of kids in the
streets of Helsinki, all carrying cell phones with messaging
capabilities. They
are not exchanging important business information, they’re just
chattering,
staying in touch. "We are herd
animals," he says. "These
kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving."
Pervasive
wireless
communication
he
believes
will
"bring us back to
behavior patterns that were natural to us and destroy
behavior patterns that were brought about by the limitations of
technology."
We are natural villagers.
For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities
in which
we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be
far too
many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us
to be
able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the
task of drawing
us together. But that is changing.
Interactivity. Many-to-many
communications. Pervasive networking. These are cumbersome new terms
for
elements in our lives so fundamental that, before we lost them, we
didn’t even
know to have names for them.
