Pornographers, fundamentalist religious movements, paedophile networks, racists, terrorists, ethnic cleansers, electronic stalkers—all these will make use of the Internet and global networks to expand the range, and sometimes the profit, of their seedy activities. Police forces all over the world are currently bemused as to how to deal with the abuse of public networks used to smuggle bytes of sadism and violence across national borders, and we are in for some big debates about what we should be allowed to do with these networks. When is a server a publisher? What is a newsgroup? And so on. All forms of publishing technology have raised issues like these in the past, but the freedom and liberty of the wired individual will tax our old moral and ethical values like no other form of publication has done. The digital copying of everything that is not nailed down will also tax good relations between nations and companies, and a select band of lawyers will make fortunes out of advising on the law (or the lack of it) concerning international and national copyright. As the old map makers of the fifteenth century put it when they did not know what was over the next ocean, ‘here be dragons’ indeed.
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Any crystal-ball gazing into the future of networking technology is a complex business because we are always enmeshed in a crisis of progress. Our motives are always mixed but socially negotiated factors, such as trust in the system one belongs to; confidence in the way that science has been applied before; political and scientific secrecy that has excluded us from potential harms or side-effects during the development phases of past technologies; our experience with the previous impacts of market forces; our faith in the capacity of our political systems to distribute the benefits of technology—all these represent reasonable axes of concern. Science transforms human identity but we also want it to be subject to the scrutiny of independent moral principles. But these principles themselves shift as science, for example as in bioengineering, declares new possibilities that in themselves transform the cartography of what we choose to regard as acceptable behaviour. Internetworking operates on many levels. It is heavily diffused throughout the rest of the technical pantheon, ‘a pack horse in the great affairs’ of so many other technologies from missile systems and financial speculation to realtime medicine over great distance and the monitoring of dangerous chemical processes. Its valuable contribution as a ‘carrier’ within these domains will no doubt go from strength to strength. It is its role in facilitating the economic and social rejuvenation of large, as opposed to elite, populations and its exacerbation of the already discernible drift towards isolation and alienation that I believe is much more questionable.
We will probably have to wait another ten years or so before we can assess the impact of the main areas of concern noted here. In 2010 those babies born in the sunny mid–1960s of reasonably well-to-do parents in developed economies, who will have grown up with computers, e-mail, computer games and CD information to help with the homework, will be in their fifties and occupying leadership roles in business and government. In their teens when IBM launched the PC, using computers to ‘connect’ will be second nature to them.
However, they will be torn between two opposing ideologies. They will know that to leave large populations of citizens outside the networking club will mean:
1.Handing competitive advantage to those nations with more egalitarian and dynamic educational systems
2.The creation of a sizable subculture who will not be able to access some of the basic tools of a modern society both at work and at play.
But they will also know that access to more and more information creates some great contradictions. Less knowledge because of all the knowledge that is now signalled to exist. Less certainty as they are exposed to an explosion of options and counter-strategies. More anxieties as the complexities of life become more visible but no more comprehensible. Less certain as facts and expertise become more disputable and as less and less knowledge is derived directly from our own senses. Instead of a world of greater certainty they will know a world where confidence is always qualified by anxious suspicions of incompleteness. The Utopian certainty of the young, predominantly male computer infatuates of the 1980s has been seriously qualified by some expensive mistakes in setting up big computer systems, the infection of software by ‘designer’ viruses—McAfee the anti-virus software vendor reckons that 90 per cent of companies experience a virus attack every month (Taylor 1997:7), by the hacker’s easy invasion of ‘secure’ environments and by fears of hardcore pornography trickling quietly into school classrooms. We have learnt to take the vehemence of the techno-optimists with more than a hard-diskfull of salt. There will be great riches and great opportunities from internetworking but there are no certainties, and we have little evidence so far to suggest that all economic groups will secure similar benefits. Without a major shift away from the current economic paradigm, we cannot doubt that it will be the economics of profit rather than of social enrichment that will be prioritised.
From : Loader, Brian D. (ed.). Cyberspace Divide: Equality, Agency and Policy in The Information Society. Routledge. (page : 31-33)
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