IS THE INTERNET MAKING US ALL STUPID?

It could perhaps be that the rise of the internet coincides with that policy of social engineering known as dumbing down, but its is hard for the mature observer to avoid the conclusion at times that the internet is making us all stupid. The net, which has actually been around since the mid 1970s and not as people are led to think, since 1990 is not what self styled web experts would have us believe. The World Wide Web was created in 1990 but the World Wide Web is a very different creature and possibly even more stupid – making.

The first thing to understand about both The Internet and the World Wide Web is that neither exists. They are abstract concepts. Internetworking was the Holy Grail of the computer industry in the seventies. Different manufacturers used different, proprietary file formats and different methods for encoding alphabetical and numerical information into streams of binary digits. And they had a vested interest in keeping it that way. Once an organisation had committed its computer systems to a particular manufacturer it was a big job to change to another make of computer.

This suited the manufacturers but not the customers who could see it wass in their interests to be able to exchange information between different systems. Thus lots of people, myself included were set to develop ways of making the world’s computers talk to each other.

The academic insitutions and the technical Research and Development communities were prime movers, by making information available instantly across a wide community, the sum total of human knowledge would be increased exponentially they reasoned. One of the first internets, because Internet was not then a proper name, was called JANet (Joint Academic Network) a system that used 1200 bits per second (and sometimes slower) links to transer text only information. JANet worked and such security problems as there were mainly involved students and academic playing tricks on each other. There was no anonymity on JANet, which meant there was no malice.

Things moved on, everyone could see that internet technologies offered possibilities that would make us, collectively if not individually, smarter. The only drawback was that though data was transmitted from host system to client over a public network, access to the hosts was controlled. If you wanted to get at files you had to establish that you were a suitable person by applying for an account to obtain a username and password.

Some people were not satisfied with this and pushed the idea of moving from internetworking technologies which enabled information stored on one network to be accessed by prople working on another, a world wide web of information accessible to all over public telecommunications networks.

When the idea was first floated, computer professionals like me were appalled at the idea. We well knew the potential for havoc posed by SSS, silicon stupidity syndrome, a medical condition that affects males educated in mathematics and more interested in reading sci – fi than philosophy whenever they are in close proximity to a computer interface. SSS induces an inability to consider consequences coupled with an urge to do something clever. And clever without regard for consequence is the worst kind of stupid.

Unfortunately, due to a triumph of PR over pragmatism, a man suffering from the most extreme kind of SSS had become the most influential figure in the computer industry. Bill Gates, founder and head of Microsoft was the type of man who thought that in a perfect world computers would think for us, plan and prepare our meals, do our laundry, choose and buy our clothes, keep our homes clean and tidy and even switch lights and appliances on and off for us. This would leave us all with more time to mess about with our computers. To him you see, there was no higher calling than to serve computers, he was not just enthusiastic but obsessed.

This was the man who commandeered for his company task of getting us all online via the World Wide Web. Now you begin to see why something that should have been great turned out so bad. Obsessive never see the big picture and so they never produce a solution for the whole task.

“The World Wide Web is the new medium, everyone must be connected, everyone must be involved and everything must be free,” was the marketing pitch. It quickly spawned some very silly ideas, for example everrything would be free and alo everyone could be a published writer