© Pierre Maré,
2004 - 2007
Offbeat 114
It has been an incredibly long seven-day week full of work by day and atrociously late nights, at least by my standards, puzzling over the repetitive, bracket-laden syntax of a web content management system.
What have I learned this week? If you want to make the internet work for you, you need to be able to distinguish between a curly bracket and a square bracket, so good eyesight or decent glasses are absolutely vital. And you need to remember to close the bracket, whatever the shape. Forward slashes are also far more useful than I ever imagined they could be.
Now I know why all those dotcom entrepreneurs set their share prices so high. Pity they couldn’t figure out that pet supplies over the net just wasn’t going to be the next evolutionary step in commerce. Ever.
I have been meaning to write a column on the cultural impact of the internet, as it is such an important part of my life, but somehow every time I sit down to it, I get sidetracked and end up giving it a mention only. Here’s another attempt…
Perhaps the best way to describe the internet is as a place where you can meet interesting people, without seeing them, and when they get boring or slightly weird, you can switch them off. Or perhaps it would be better to say that it is the one non-biological cultural strand that will be common to humanity, aside from the desire for expensive consumer electronics.
The internet is no longer limited to computers: it is proliferating on mobile technology as well. It changes a lot of things. For a start, it makes it almost impossible to nurture a cherished belief in isolation. Unless you are truly stupid, or your service provider is down, the truth, or at least someone’s truth no matter how strange it is, is out there, and someone will see it. Gone are the days when church or state could define and communicate a belief system, and expect the masses to accept it without question or comparison.
Nor is it possible to get a conspiracy or hidden agenda up and running without some or other Smart Alec posting about it somewhere where everyone can read about it, even if it comes as completely unexpected news to the named conspirators.
Thanks to blogs and other forms of instant websites, everyone can expose their views to humanity, even if they aren’t entirely comfortable with the fine distinction between curly and square brackets.
But the internet is not a uniting factor either, at least in the broad sense. Although there may still be some isolated pockets of humanity who have not yet been exposed to the imagery from Paris Hilton’s sex video posted all over the internet, more interesting still is the manner in which the internet disunites us.
Once upon a time, believing something different entailed the metaphor of a voice crying out in the wilderness. Today the wilderness is populated with bands of happy campers, theme parks and meaningful activities for the children. If you have a passion for the different types of sand found in the western reaches of Mongolia, take heart: you can meet others who are like you. And the same applies if you believe the earth is flat.
So strangers come together, forming smaller groups of individuals finding strength in numbers, and challenges to the larger groups are sounded.
Culturally, this will have a massive impact on large segments of the entertainment industry. Take the music industry: previously it was easy to package music and sell it to hordes of people. Today music can be downloaded, song by song, rendering albums redundant and giving a far wider choice of singles, artists and styles.
Music has a massive effect on society, as does all the media which we consume. And so does politics and religion.
This does not sound the death knell of society: geographical groupings remain, and knowledge transfers physically as well as electronically. But the internet will cause us to better examine our choices by forcing us to confront that which is different.
It’s a brave new world out there. Have you logged on yet?
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