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This "access revolution" of the Internet is not only in the amount and the different locations of material, but equally in the breadth of different subject matter that is available at the click of a button. On any given subject, you can find a wider array of information, but especially by browsing through the list of the 10,000 Internet newsgroups find and explore subjects which had never occurred to me. This has both its advantages and its disadvantages. You might be a doctor with a patient suffering from a rare disease of which you had no prior experience, and yet be able to find via the Internet a doctor in a hospital thousands of miles away with recent experience of treating it. Or anyone could find a host of new forms of sexual perversion. The sheer ease of access creates its own problems and accentuates others, as well as finding a host of solutions and possibilities.
It also extends the range of people potentially able to access any material. Much information has always been theoretically available, but in practice was unknown outside a relatively narrow slice of the population who were especially interested in that area and knew where to find it. All this can now be found readily enough by anyone who cares to explore - in the excruciating jargon that has inevitably built up around the Internet, to "surf the Net" - imaginatively enough to find out. This includes children, who are not only naturally more curious to know "what happens if...?" , but are often far more au fait with the Internet, its techniques and tricks than their parents.
There is a certain freedom in being able to browse around and see what's on offer, without someone looking over your shoulder. But the removal of the constraint that "someone might see" can also open up a world of temptation simply because the normal limits which human interaction place on our behaviour have been transcended. To a limited extent that is true of multi-channel television watching, but so much more is available via the Internet than by any other form of communication that puts the question on to a quite different level. The range of pornographic material, in particular, probably far exceeds any other single channel of access, and there is no one to see you, as it were, reaching up to the top shelf to have a peep. To assume that everyone will of course be responsible about this is simply naive. Reliable statistics are difficult in this area, but surveys of most "visited" categories of site suggested that visits to "adult" sites vastly exceeded all other categories. Anonymity is a key factor.
The ability to do the same thing for non-existing groups varies. Some coalitions are as ephemeral as the latest action, some are international, virtual and never meet in person. The possibilities are endless provided someone is prepared to keep the channels open, moderate the immoderate language people use when there is no visible human present and it's so easy to press SEND in anger.
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Benefits and Dangers
In principle, the Internet should have a rather positive evaluation, but within this context of communication is the obvious caveat that the use of the Internet, like all technology, is subject to the individuals and organisations who put it to use, for good or ill. In this respect, the Internet is ethically ambiguous. Taking this further, we must ask what sort of knowledge the Internet is especially making available, and to whom? Who and what are being left out, by comparison? What are the features of the Internet itself which influence what people do with the knowledge they get while using it? Just as reading a book or going to see a play or a film all involve different ways of receiving and using "data", what effects will the type of knowledge the Internet provides have on us?
In an unexpected development, retired people are finding a new interest and way of communicating via the Net. It is no longer seen as primarily the preserve of the young and unattached. The pornography debate has highlighted the need for parents not just to keep an eye on where their children are "surfing", but to become just as familiar with the Net themselves, and to grasp its potential as a family resource for learning, playing and sharing. As far as can be judged, the Internet has so far appealed significantly more to males, and for a variety of reasons. More should be done to encourage women to find their own ways of using its potential.
A rapidly developing area of the Internet is in advertising and sales, but instead of the advertising coming to you via the television or a magazine or a hoarding, on the Internet the consumer goes to the advertising. Computer shopping is seen as a new growth area as parallel developments such as networking via the television, placing orders and banking transactions on-line, and, in due course, virtual reality come to fruition. The idea is to be able to sit at the computer and look at pictures of items in a display menu, get an on-line description and specification, and even turn them round and "feel" them by virtual reality. No one knows how far this will be a trendy gimmick for a few people, or how much this will change our patterns of shopping yet again. Taken to the limit, it could make the newly built shopping malls, so recently seen as icons of the late twentieth century, somewhat redundant.
And that is both the opportunity and the problem. Any data can be sent down a phone line or put up on the screen. If a picture of a distant nebula or galaxy can be sent from Hawaii, potentially so can pornography from Hamburg, share prices from the Hang Seng, goods advertised from Harrods, human rights information from Haiti, or a list of someone's favourite rock groups and ice-cream flavours from Harrisburg. The Internet, in all its various manifestations, reveals far more readily, and indiscriminately to more people, far more of what goes on in human society, than perhaps any form of communication yet devised. This indiscriminate opening up of "all human life" brings areas to light that are normally hidden, brings some questions to light, which hitherto have been far from most people's thoughts or experience.
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Not in front of the children?
It is controversial because there is widespread cultural opposition across the Net to any sort of policing or control of a system because its entire evolved ethos is the free passage of all and any information, safe from interference by Government, police, commercial or political interests, or simply by "busybodies". That is a freedom much cherished by many Net users, and an expression of the alternative, virtual community which, to some extent at least, the Net provides. Its values are almost archetypally post-modern. There is almost certainly something there to suit the most bizarre of tastes, and if there isn't, you can always start one. No overarching world view holds sway, everyone is free to express on the Net the values they feel, especially within the privacy and internal etiquette of their Newsgroups. You do your thing and let me do mine. If you don't like something, then you have the choice not to look at it, but do not have the right to impose your standards on it by objecting to its existence. A Christian message offering help posted to a newsgroup known to be dubious as a cover for paedophilia was greeted with several abusive responses, telling the author sharply to get his nose out of their area and stick to religious groups. The church would do well to recognise that for those for whom the Internet represents an icon of post-modernity, or just simply the freedom to do their own thing, the idea of censorship or controls is likely to be received as the church or others seeking to exert power over them.
At first sight, there seems to be more chance of controlling the type of sources of material actually being offered for viewing or groups for participating, but this is not straightforward. Many newsgroups and Web sites are fairly obvious. There are a growing number of programmes written which can be installed on to a computer to filter out certain parts of the Internet known to be pornographic or otherwise unsuitable for children. There are various ways of doing this, depending typically on an updateable blacklist of Web sites and newsgroups, defined by categories or certain keywords. Even at their best, these could never be foolproof.
Firstly, competent hackers simply regard such controls as a challenge waiting to be cracked. Again, the "list" of forbidden sites could attain a mystique, and almost inevitably someone would find out what was in it. Only certain families in the neighbourhood might buy the control software, and it could lead to clandestine surfing parties at the home of someone whose parents didn't censor the Net in any way. Human ingenuity to get around rules, given a sufficient incentive, knows few bounds.
The more important questions these methods raise, however, is abrogating parental responsibilities to "technological fixes". It is one thing to have such a piece of software as an aid to something you are doing already, in keeping in touch with what your children are watching, and it also sends a clear message of the standards of behaviour expected for the whole family. But the temptation is to use it as a substitute for the much trickier task of educating a child on what the world is like, what people are like and what sort of standards are good ones to live by.
Another method is for the "service providers" through whom people are connected to the Internet to refuse to give their subscribers access to certain sites and groups, or to have such groups located on their computer. Only some do this. The free ethos of the Internet as a people system, beyond the interference of "them" is always likely to militate against universal restrictions. And, again, someone down the street could be linked to a non-restricted provider. Even if legislation were introduced, the more obvious "banned" sites and newsgroups would simply disappear beneath another level of encryption, move to a site with a less obvious name, and communicate the taboo key words by using euphemisms, like the original use of Cockney rhyming slang in London. It is true of censorship in general that the more pressure is put on groups, up to a point the more they find clever ways of hiding themselves.
A further aspect is that pornography is by no means the only disturbing feature of widespread access. The same freedom that has several times enabled human rights abuses to reach the outside world via the Internet, where all other communications channels were too dangerous to the "dissident", also allows organised crime and commercial abuses to transcend societal controls. Another area of currently concern is that alliances are being formed that will enable a few trans-national media barons gradually to control the global communications media through the newly emerging technologies, of which the Internet is one. Whereas nobody could control its use, the possibility of manipulation by a few companies controlling either the services or the software media is a factor which needs vigilance. This raises afresh the question : to what and to whom are such consortia answerable, since their business does not belong to any normal community of society, and so escape and transcend the normal ways societies have of exercising control?
In the long term, if its promise really is fulfilled, how is a medum which is international, stateless and structureless going to affect national issues of trade, banking, defence, and even identity. At the moment what we have is a bundle of questions, and few of them will be easy to answer.
Using the Technology Well
So much depends on the discipline and imagination brought to bear in the use of this remarkable technological development. It is much too easy to let its potential dictate terms to us, instead of the other way round. It is a tool to be picked up, used for its purpose, and put down again, not something which dominates us. We need to work at its potential, as some are already doing to give positive alternatives to the things that others will undoubtedly find to do with it. It is a potential means, by the exercise of our imagination, of developing and sharing the things about life and living which we as Christians believe are of eternal value - treasures in heaven. We who see value in wisdom and understanding as well as mere knowledge and in self-giving love than mere individual experiences alone should welcome this new development, but see it in its place and not beyond it.
This article was originally written in August 1996 but was added to on 7 March 2006
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