The Digitized Citizen

For the past year, Aleks Krotoski has worked on a four-part documentary for BBC2 on the Virtual Revolution, aiming to identify the political, social, economic, and psychological implications of the Internet. In doing so he came across, and interviewed a host of characters, from the web pioneers like Sir Tim Berners-Lee (credited with in essence inventing the World Wide Web), to the e-upstarts like Jack Dorsey who revolutionized online socializing when he co-founded Twitter in 2006.

His Guardian article is well worth reading, and I wish I lived in the UK so I could view his documentary.

From the outset of the Internet, my enthusiasm for the wonder of it has always shared the stage with this louder-at-times-than-others voice of dissention, warning about the dehumanizing and dare I say robotizing effects of the Internet. When words like "real world" started cropping up as the exception to on-line life, well, then I got a little nervous, and I believe I had a right to.

For one thing, we believe, as Krotoski points out, that when we interact with the Internet it's just us and It, but really, few things could be farther from the truth. When we ask Google to show us this or that which we are truly interested in, a whole network of note-taking software make entries against our name (or IP address more likely) about our preferences in every field conceivable, entries which are then shared with commercial companies who use it to customize offers specifically for us. Helping advertisers, and others who want to tell us something that might benefit them, adjust the cross hairs comes to mind.

Krotoski also points out that depending where we stand in the political, or even religious, spectrum, wonders like Twitter are either a blessing or a curse. Keeping us abreast of all our heroes' doings, or informed about the time and place of a protest rally, Twitter can do no wrong. Helping coordinate a fundamentalist bomb attack, it becomes evil incarnate.

Children and teenagers who grew up with the Internet, according to Krotoski, no longer search for answers at the depth their Internet-free parents might have done. One Google search term, and the top two or three replies might just do it: just like in our old days, if it was printed in the paper, then it must be true--now it's: if Google returns it, well then it must be true.

Now, of course the Internet is the most amazing communication medium conceivable, don't take me wrong, I do love it; but that voice of dissention will not shut up and it keeps invoking the Sorcerer's Apprentice of Disney's Fantasia trying to master the ever multiplying brooms running amok. Along the lines of getting the Genie back into the bottle.

And the Genie is out, irretrievably out. The thing to never lose sight of, however, is the humanity of who should be the master of it, not mastered by it.