The growing web of illusion

Information apartheid? You've got to be kidding. ‘Ignore the Web and you are dead’-- the phrase has been repeated so often that it is frequently mistaken to be true. The statistics and facts bandied in its support are impressive indeed. With an estimated 250 million surfers expected to be hooked on the Internet by the year 2000, doing everything from checking the news to having sex online, it does sometimes appear that the hyperbole about a second 'Gutenberg Revolution' may not be all hoopla after all.

The Internet mandarins promise a change in social and commercial mores on par with that which marked the shift from the medieval era to Renaissance, and transformed everything forever. It is now generally accepted that one of the crucial keys behind this tremendous change was the Gutenberg Press, which liberated knowledge from the hands of monks and their powerful overlords, and made it freely available to all in the form of books.

Knowledge is Power, goes the saying, and the Gutenberg Press conclusively proved it. The Internet apparently takes the process of unbridled knowledge dissemination to its logical culmination. Digitally transmitted data about everything from the weather to stock prices to revolutionary theories is cheaply available to surfers sitting at home without middlemen. Crucially, the rigidities on information that the printing press, or its successors like the gramophone or cinema imposed, do not apply to the Internet.

Hypertext, which lets a surfer jump seamlessly from one document to another, creates a surfer-define trail of ideas, unlike the progression of knowledge in books which bind the reader to the logic of knowledge contained within their own isolated wholes. The reader, on the Internet, thus becomes the critical determinant of knowledge, rather than the writer.

This alters, quite fundamentally, the nature of knowledge as we understand it. And internizens claim that it will redefine the way we conduct our daily lives. The recent Mars landing are often cited as illustrations of how information travels and mutates on the Internet. Even while the landing was netcast live, discussion groups and chat rooms were already discussing its ramifications and creating ideas that would have taken weeks to evolve via conventional media. So how surprising is it when there are exhortations by Net buffs that the fountain of knowledge now lies embedded in your very own keyboard.

The belief hinges on the assumption that the wired world will make information ubiquitous , and the statistics about the growing rate of Internet penetration seem to bode the inevitability of this process. But must we get carried away by the cyber-babble about equality of information, and the concomitant utopian promise of freedom and egalitarian society that the Internet carries?

There is a growing school of disbelievers who claim that the Internet may instead be taking us towards a deeply divided society which will recreate the ancient regressive divide between the information 'haves' and have nots'. This is the process that they describe as 'information apartheid'.

There is growing fear that the Internet may one day see the birth of information cartels that will make the Internet tenet of free information all but illusory. The very technology that makes information easy to distribute over a wide area, makes it doubly easy to cut off all information lines at the touch of a motivated keystroke. The Clipper chip, which was on top of the US government agenda not too long ago, was a glimpse of the future where governments or other cartels will find it ridiculously easy to build permanent walls around sensitive information. And nobody will know.

The Internet is still what may be described as an 'elitist' club - over 90 percent of the world's people are virtually barred from the Internet by traditional factors like geography, tyranny, poverty and illiteracy. It is unlikely that technology will in the near future have any answers to make the web a more accessible place. Till it does, or till society finds a more egalitarian alternative, we will have to live with an Internet that can only create illusions of freedom.

Also on http://www.prasanna.org/TheGrowingWebofIllusion.htm

First published on http://www.expressindia.com/ie/daily/19980317/07650404.html

Originally written in 1997.