Read this chapter to satisfy your curiosity about good things the Internet fosters. The answers include these:
As someone who's curious about the Internet, you're going to notice a lot of discussion about it in the media and perhaps among your friends and acquaintances. Two extremes will frame the discussions you encounter:
As with most debates, the truth lies somewhere in-between. To help you develop your own perspective on the debate, this chapter and the next present a sort of point-counterpoint. Here, you'll get a wholly partisan look at what's good about the
Internet. In Chapter 4, you'll get a tough dose of unalloyed Internet paranoia. My hope is that by examining the two extremes separately, you'll equip yourself to find your own middle ground on this complex—and ongoing—controversy.
Now, I have to point out that this chapter is only about half as long as Chapter 4, which would tend to create the impression that I think the "cons" of the Internet outweigh the "pros." Well, I'm not telling what I think — I
don't want to influence your judgment. But I will explain that Chapter 4 is longer because it is the only chapter that really covers the potential downside of the Internet. The chapter you're reading, on the other hand, has help. By showing you all the
wonderful things people can do on the Internet, Chapters 1, 2, 5, 6, 7, and 8 are all pro-Internet, in effect.
With that in mind, here we go. I will now put on my "I © the Internet" hat, and take inspiration from the Internet's biggest booster, the Vice President.
Did You Know. . .
As discussed in Chapter 2, the Internet helps scientists and researchers do their jobs more effectively by giving them access to exhaustive, up-to-date information compiled by other scientists and researchers.
The Internet also gives scientists access to equipment that they do not have at their own institutions. For example, an observatory in New Mexico has a telescope that scientists in other countries can actually aim and look through (by looking at
computer graphics sent to their computers) by way of the Internet.
Also made possible by the Internet are parallel, or collaborative, research projects. Teams of scientists located all over the country or over the world can work individually on portions of a larger research project, using the Internet to share and
consolidate their findings. Major projects that would exceed the resources (staff, equipment, and computing power) of the largest institutions in the world can be undertaken this way, with each partipating institution performing the part that it is best
equipped to handle.
A good example of parallel research is the Humane Genome Project (see Figure 3.1). Funded in part by the Federal Government and involving the world's best genetics labs, the project is a massive 15-year plan to identify all 100,000 or more human genes,
possibly unlocking the secrets to preventing many birth defects and genetically influenced diseases, such as cancer. Fifteen years is a long time, but scientists have commented that such a project conducted by a single research lab could take a century.
That's another 85 years of preventable human suffering.
Figure 3.1. An Internet resource for learning about the Human Genome project.
Other cooperative initiatives that use the Internet are the initiatives for curing AIDS and other infectious diseases, developing alternative fuels, predicting earthquakes and volcanic eruptions, and saving species from extinction—and all that's
just the beginning.
In theory, every message exchanged by computer saves the paper that would otherwise have been used, plus the energy used and the pollution produced to make the paper. Ditto books and lengthy research materials available electronically over the
Internet.
The only catch is, nobody really knows if it's working that way. For one thing, people have a funny habit of printing stuff that they could just as easily read on a computer screen. For another, the manufacture of computers, the generating of the
electricity required by the computers and the network, and the radiation produced by computers and power lines may also be sources of pollution. So it's difficult to say for sure whether the Internet helps make the world a greener place. It is known that
the amount of paper used worldwide has continued to rise every year, even as use of computers and the Internet expands.
But then again, nobody's proved that the Internet doesn't save trees. So if you want to see the Internet as an environmentally progressive development, be my guest. Nobody can prove you wrong, at least not yet.
There's a stubborn freedom-of-information tenet to Internet culture. Many Internet users believe (correctly, if you ask me and Thomas Jefferson) that secrets are anathema to freedom and democracy. These folks sometimes make themselves into
investigative reporters who keep an eye out for important, unreported information and then spill the truth out onto the Internet. In particular, they're opposed to gag orders that prevent the media from reporting about certain stories. When the print and
broadcast media's hands are tied, the Internet community kicks into high gear.
A good example involved the trials of Karla Homolka and her husband Paul Bernardo in Ontario, as reported in The Nation. In her trial, Homolka pled guilty to two gruesome murders, and while she was at it, she said Bernardo—who was scheduled to be
tried later—made her do it. To prevent potential jurors for Bernardo's trial from learning too much about the case, the Canadian court forbade the media from reporting the details of Homolka's trial.
Offended that their government would dare to censor coverage of a public court proceeding, Internet users in Toronto created an Internet resource to which they posted daily updates about the trial, which were read the world over.
The Canadian Government went to great lengths to stop the Internet users. The police left threatening messages on the bulletin board (the mounted police, no less; presumably they use the Internet from saddle-mounted PCs), and the resource had to be
renamed after all the Canadian universities switched off local access to it under pressure from the government. (The universities couldn't prevent Internet access to it, though, because to do so, they would have had to sever the university from the
Internet entirely.) Ultimately, the Internet users were able to continue funneling information while successfully eluding the Canadian police.
Did You Know. . .
Another example is the smuggling of information out of Russia during the 1991 coup attempt. From the beginning of the fighting, the pro-coup KGB blacked out the print and broadcast media, preventing any news from circulating around the country or
reaching the Western media, and also preventing any international news from reaching the Soviet people.
A small Russian e-mail company collected news from the banned newspapers and radio stations, local reports from its subscribers and even communiqués from Boris Yeltsin himself, and published it all on the Internet through a link in Finland. The
Western media, including CNN and the Associated Press, culled the news from the Internet and spread it to the world beyond. The company also collected world news from the Internet and distributed it to Soviet citizens through its e-mail subscribers.
If the truth shall make you free, the Internet can indeed be a carrier for freedom.
As you'll learn in Chapter 5, using the Internet is free, but not really.
Be that as it may, there's stuff users can get from the Internet that they don't have to pay for. So although the Internet isn't really free, the stuff really is. A few favorites are in Table 3.1.
Stuff |
Sources |
|
Books (in electronic form, of course) |
The Online Book Project and Project Gutenberg. |
|
Software |
Software companies that provide customer service on the Internet, the Free Software Foundation, hundreds of Internet resources that have software for copying, including files of sound and video clips. |
|
Advice |
Newsgroups, e-mail. |
|
Fine art |
The WebLouvre, a facility that provides full-color computer files of masterworks. A growing number of museums and galleries also offer a peek at their holdings through the Internet. |
|
Rare/historical photographs |
The Smithsonian Institution, several universities. |
|
General reference information |
CIA World Fact Book, Concise Oxford Dictionary, Oxford Dictionary of Familiar Quotations, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Roget's Thesaurus. |
|
|
|
Business use of the Internet is controversial. Still, there's no doubt people are making money on, through, and around the Internet.
For example, a company called the Internet Shopping Network makes its database of information about the computers and software it sells available on the Internet. Customers can get their answers without costing the Shopping Network a printed catalog or
live sales associate. Customers can also place orders through the Internet. The company uses the savings to underprice its competitors. There will be a steady growth in the number of such services, and they'll be joined by new ventures such as electronic
banking, magazine subscriptions and classified advertising (see Figure 3.2). Visionary entrepreneurs will use the resources and community of the Internet to open new markets, design new products, and stimulate the economy.
Figure 3.2. Classified advertising, a recent arrival on the Internet.
An emerging new business model, called the Virtual Corporation (VC), may depend heavily on the Internet. In the VC, the large company staffed with permanent workers is replaced by a small team of executives who manage an ever-changing field of
freelancers who are hired and let go as needed. The VC can respond more rapidly to changing business needs than can a traditional corporation, and it can operate more efficiently by only paying workers when there's a specific project for which they're
required.
Advocates say the VC will make businesses more competitive, and will also bring about a huge upswing in self-employment, which many people find more satisfying than traditional employment. The Internet will help make the the VC possible by making it
easy for managers to find, hire, and communicate with the best freelancers, wherever they may be located.
People with certain disabilities can find traditional written communication difficult. For example, the blind can't read written paper mail, and those with motor impairments sometimes have trouble with letters and envelopes.
There are dozens of products that enable the disabled to use computers: Braille keyboards and finger-readers for the blind, and mouth sticks and other gadgets for the motor-impaired. For both the blind and the motor-impaired, there are voice-response
systems that enable the computer to respond to voice commands and also enable it to speak words that appear on the computer screen. These tools empower disabled people to do anything that can be done with a computer. (Of course, typewritten communication
by computer has obvious benefits for the deaf and hearing impaired— with no special accessories required.)
Really Curious?
Given appropriate accommodations, most disabled people can use a computer— and thus the Internet. The Internet offers them a way to communicate with the world, perhaps even more easily than they do in person. There are also many Internet resources
that serve the specific needs and interests of disabled people and enable them to exchange advice and ideas.
Did You Know. . .
Through e-mail and other resources, the Internet provides an easy way for 30 million people, from everywhere in the world, to discover each other and to communicate on equal terms across a place with no borders, boundaries, or class distinctions
(language, though, remains a barrier). Other potential cultural divisions—such as race and religion—can be left out of the Internet discussion, or made an important part of them, at the user's discretion.
Because they are built around a specific topic, Internet newsgroups and mailing lists (see Chapter 7) make a natural meeting place for people with common interests to come together. There are also Internet resources dedicated to the idea that the
Internet's ability to bring people together can make a better world. For example, PeaceNet is a cooperative project that distributes information and facilitates interaction among peace advocates worldwide (see Figure 3.3).
Figure 3.3. PeaceNet.
Some also promote the idea of Virtual Communities, subsets of Internet users who form their own little collective network with its own rules, membership requirements, and security.
That sounds like a step backward from the "everybody's welcome" spirit of the whole Internet, and it can be. But don't forget that the Virtual Communities are founded from people who discovered one another—and their commonalties—on
the Internet.
Did You Know. . .
Let's see, ways to meet potential life-mates_bars_adult education classes_singles retreats_community theatre_ the produce aisle. Telephone party lines. The Internet.
Yes, people meet and fall in love on the Internet, though I've heard it's rare. They can meet anywhere on the Internet, but a few resources are specifically set aside for posting "personals" to help people find one another. I suppose it's a
pretty big step when the relationship moves past the personals and to the e-mail stage.
This may seem like a very small way to make the world a better place, but not if you've recently had the misfortune to walk all the way to the Coke machine for nothing. People have started riots for less.
Having both access to computers and way too much time on their hands, enterprising folks at several universities have connected their cola machines to the school computer system so they could make sure the machine wasn't empty before trudging down the hall. (Refer to "It Separates and Isolates People" in Chapter 4.) Because these university computers are on the Internet, other Internet users around the world can find out whether there's enough Coke at Columbia or U. Wisconsin. While the early, groundbreaking work in this field was done on Coke machines, visionaries have also hooked a hot tub and a coffee maker to the Internet. (And you wondered why tuition was so high?)
Fig 3.4 A program that monitors the coffe pot at the University of Cambridge, accessed through the Internet
What Internet users get out of that I'm not sure. Maybe two colleges competing for a research grant can monitor each other's caffeine and sugar consumption, to be sure to keep the playing field level.
Really Curious?
Did you hear the one about the Internet user who took a job on a fishing boat because he liked the net work? ("Net work!" Get it?)
Plenty of yuks can be had on the Internet. As in any conversation, Internet messages are often punctuated with jokes. Because the messages are written rather than spoken, however, the users have time to try to be clever and to polish their material
before sending it out. This results in more bad jokes than good, but it's the thought that counts.
Several newsgroups (see Chapter 7) are dedicated to humor. Internet users can visit these when they need a quick shot of silliness, but unfortunately, these newsgroups are not reliable sources of humor for most people's tastes. For reasons I do not
know, the majority of jokes in these resources are of the Beavis & Butthead level. By that I don't mean the sly, satirical humor sometimes served up by the Beavis & Butthead show. I mean the kind of jokes Beavis and Butthead themselves would
snicker at— adolescent, tasteless, crude, sick, dumb. Worse yet, many are also sexist or racist. Efforts have been made to clean up these resources by putting them under the supervision of a moderator, but they've not improved much.
Did You Know. . .
The better humor on the Internet is found elsewhere: in the everyday exchanges between Internet users and in the odd resource that serves up humor with a little smarts. For example, I came across "Hamlet was a College Student" in a recent edition of Gonzo, an electronic publication of Georgetown University and heir to the subversive style of Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. The article uses accurate, verbatim quotes from Shakespeare's Hamlet to support its thesis.
Fig. 3.5"Hamlet was a College Student," and article in Gonzo.
When injecting humor into their correspondence and other Internet message writing, Internet users are not unaware that written jokes lack the benefits of inflection and timing that often make spoken jokes funny. Over time, they've adopted an elaborate
code of little typed symbols, called smileys, to expand the expressive range of written communication. Among the symbols used in the smiley language are those shown in the following list. To see the little faces of the smileys, you have to tilt your head
to the left.
|
:-) |
A basic smile, denoting happiness or sarcasm |
|
:) |
Also a smile |
|
;-) |
Wink |
|
:-D |
Laughing |
|
:-} |
Grin |
|
:-P |
Plbbbt! |
|
:-( |
Sad face |
|
8-) |
Wide-eyed |
|
B-) |
Wearing glasses |
|
|
|
The first five smileys are often typed adjacent to jokes, just so the reader can tell they're jokes even if they fail to be funny. (If Jay Leno's monologue was on the Internet, he'd have to use lots of them.)
This is one of those issues that's good or bad (the bad perspective is covered in Chapter 4) depending on your own, private value system.
If you're among those who believe that looking at nudie pictures or reading erotic poetry and fiction is a positive—or simply harmless—pastime and promoter of a healthy libido, the Internet makes your world a better place. Through resources
dedicated to the sexy side of life, users can read or copy erotic writing. They can also copy full-color, detailed, anatomically correct, photo-realistic graphics files of naked people and sexual acts. The pictures can be displayed on a computer screen
(see Chapter 7), or even printed on a printer capable of handling high-resolution graphics.
Given the traditional demographics of both the Internet and pornography, the overwhelming majority of this type of material caters to the tastes of heterosexual men. But all genders, tastes, and preferences are served somewhere on the Internet.
Did You Know. . .
The world is made better in part by the Internet and the people who use it. There are the big reasons, such as the free exchange of news and information and the support of science, and the little reasons, like laughs and love.
In any case, 20 million people can't be wrong. There's a lure to the depth of resources available on the Internet. And once people get hooked on knowing, they don't give up easily.
