A Benign View of the Internet

One of the useful aspects of our adaptations to this dimension is that bad news always dominate our consciousness whereas the good we take for granted. Thus we don’t exult minute to minute because our heart is beating, but if a period of arrhythmia sets in, look out! We can think of nothing else until we’re back in rhythm again. The negative compels because it’s natures way of calling out for action—even when, alas, there is nothing we can actually do.

This applies to anything, not least the Internet. Irritation and greed dominate the news and often our feelings about this medium. Therefore, occasionally, and a Sunday is not a bad time to do this, it is worthwhile to contemplate the huge positive which a relatively low-cost, global, and on the whole quite reliable communications medium presents, especially in the great desert that industrial civilization is.

If we ignore spam, viruses, and pornography on the one hand and the buzz about the commercial aspects of the Internet on the other, what remains is a huge social benefit that dwarfs the negatives. The Internet is really a self-sustaining cooperative sphere of communication that we support willingly, indeed gladly. It permits us to associate across vast distances with people we want link to.

I’ve provided some documentation for this in an earlier posting on Internet numbers here. There I pointed out that what the Internet fundamentally is is a service that we maintain by paying monthly access and service fees. The total economic footprint of the Internet, at least as the Census of Business measures it, was $116 billion in 2007. Of that a whopping 87.2 percent was expenditure by private individuals and institutions on access and portals, thus the communications system itself, the portals through which the content passes, the processing hardware, and the disc space on which it is stored ($101.2 billion). Most of the hue and cry is about attempts to abuse this system or to exploit it for self-enrichment by commercial interests—not least the titanic battles between big names for dominance and control.

But the vast majority on the Internet, not least corporations and not-for-profit institutions, are there because they want to be. Most are present despite the fact that to be on the Internet is a net cost to them, not a money-making venture. It is as much a part of their behavior as wearing clothes. Behind it is social urge to belong to the community, to be seen and heard, and to see and hear.

Blogging is, of course, one aspect of this. It makes possible the formation of communities of like-minded people who, without this electronic environment, would probably never become aware of one another. It strikes me as interesting and meaningful that any system, pressed to its ultimate edges, mysteriously transforms into another. Images from puzzling over chaos theory come to me, writing this. There it is shown that systems that become chaotic then eventually order themselves again—always assuming that energy is flowing. The new order decays again, but that decay, in turn, will organize. Thus the dehumanizing forces of industrial civilization have now produced a wonder. It is benign. And we all benefit. Forget the low-life and the greedy high-life. Almost unnoticed, our lives have been quickened by stronger, more frequent, and more vivid connection to far-away loved ones and the relatively easy formation of communities based on elective affinities.

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Addendum: My better half suggests that I confess here how I resisted, then bad-mouthed, criticized, then used, then finally came to admire this medium. I do. I confess. I always have to be dragged kicking and screaming. My Mother used to say, “One has to slap you into happiness! No other way.”