There has been a lot of commentary about the downsides of the Internet generally and of social media in particular…lowered attention spans, on-line bullying, growing narcissism, rapid spread of untrue information, etc–even, perhaps, inhibiting the assimilation of immigrants…and many of these concerns are indeed valid. However:
Imagine that there is no Internet.
In this alternate history, the traditional media still rule They may choose to provide online access to some of their content, but user-generated content will be enabled only in the form of ‘letters to the editor’, which, like their print prototypes, are published online very selectively and at the total discretion of the major media organizations. In the sphere of commerce, large corporations may offer some form of online ordering, but there is no such thing as just putting up a website and seeing what you can sell.
Would this no-Internet world really be an improvement?
I’ve previously quoted something said to me once by a wise executive:
When you’re running a large organization, you aren’t seeing reality. It’s like you’re watching a movie where you get to see maybe one out of a thousand frames, and from that you have to figure out what is going on.
If this is true about running large organizations, it is even more true for the citizen and voter in a large and complex country. The individual can directly observe only a small amount of the relevant information, for the rest–from the events on the border to international and military affairs–he is generally dependent on others. And that gives those others–those who choose the frames and the sequence in which they are presented in the movie analogy–a tremendous amount of power. This is especially dangerous when those controllers of the information all have similar backgrounds and worldviews.
Some may argue that we managed without the Internet, not so many years ago, and that that absence didn’t lead to disasters. And some have argued that without a feeling of threat from increasingly-dominant Internet competition, the legacy media would be more balanced and responsible, would not have become so one-sided and tendentious. As a guide what an Internet-less world would be like today, though, I think these arguments don’t apply. Thirty or forty years ago, local and regional networks and broadcasters were more common and more significant than they are today, and journalists were more diverse (in a professional and background sense) than they are today. (And even back then, there was plenty of group-think and lack of coverage of important issues and topics.) My own view is that a non-Internet world would be conformist, intellectually stifling, and very dangerous in terms of the evolution of national policies.)
Not to mention the malign effect on economic dynamism.
Yet I get the impression that a lot of people would prefer, or think they would prefer, such a world.
And European countries do seem determined to use censorship and threats to try to simulate a pre-Internet world as nearly as they can. We will see how that works out for them.
Your thoughts?
Related posts: Betrayal, also Starvation and Centralization.