THE LORD SAID TO NOAH, THE WIRE NEXT TIME :

Scientists hope to download some insight into online interactions (Bruce Bower, May 4, 2002, Science News)

Two contrasting schools of cyberthought offer explanations for what's happening. Optimists regard the World Wide Web and e-mail as realms for making and keeping friends, joining global communities, and exchanging ideas freely outside the bounds of oppressive government restrictions. Pessimists argue that online endeavors pull people away from real-world interactions, make them less concerned about their communities, and provide a forum for hate groups. They also charge that the Internet creates unprecedented opportunities for governments to monitor citizens' private lives.

Both views simplify an unsettled situation. Much of the Internet's allure lies in its flexibility. People adapt it to their own purposes, whether for good or ill. For instance, in the 48 hours after the terrorist attacks of last Sept. 11, more than 4 million people contacted family and friends by e-mail to check on their safety and used e-mail and the Internet to find out what had happened. Yet government investigations indicate that the Al Qaeda terror network used hard-to-trace e-mail missives to organize the attacks and has since expanded its Internet presence.

Amid this online ferment, there's little that investigators know for certain. Robert Kraut, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, was among the first to peer into the Internet's social side. "Scientists are on the cusp of being able to say something sensible about the effects of the Internet on social life," he says. "It's premature to make any sweeping statements about what's going on."

There is one sweeping statement we can make though, and its implications are truly startling : the Internet has only barely begun to have an effect on social life. Obviously if you're reading this you have a computer. It's likely your friends and family, co-workers and neighbors all have them too. It may well seem to you that we live in a wired world. But the reality is that we only even live in a half-wired nation, and that the richest nation on Earth. And if America, the epicenter of the Information Age, only has half of its population on-line, imagine how small a proportion of the global population must be on-line. It seems likely that Internet access will become at least as ubiquitous as the telephone itself, and this means that there is still explosive growth ahead for the medium, and massive change still to come for America and, even more so, for the underdeveloped world.

Our economy may be in a tech slump right now, but peering ahead, the stage is set for a long and deep technology boom. Far from having reached a saturation point, computers are relatively scarce in global terms. I don't know where you'd find the numbers, but subtract the number of phones on the planet by the number of PCs and you've got a number that predicts the growth remaining. I think it's probably a pretty big number.

Meanwhile, environmentalists, Islamic fundamentalists and others may object to the impact that globalization (in the form of liberal, democratic, protestant, capitalist ideas) is having now, but the process has only just begun; because what the Internet is, above all, is a conduit for ideas and the more spigots that open the harder it will be to contain the flood of ideas.

We like to indulge ourselves by believing that we live in particularly complex and extraordinary times, but where the Internet Age is concerned, it seems quite likely that this is still just the antediluvian period.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 9, 2002 10:05 AM