Using the Internet

Using Internet for information exchange
Facilitating use of the Internet

Context

William N. Joy, Founder and Chief Scientist of Sun Microsystems, USA, predicts that six different webs will be run on top of the Internet. Four will have people in the loop: (1) today's version (the "sit-up web"); (2) an information web delivered through mobiles and pocket communicators ("phone web"); (3) an entertainment web; and (4) a voice-activated web (for appliances, etc.). The fifth is a computer-to-computer web for e-business and the sixth is a "pervasive computing web" for networking wherever there are electronic devices. He said the first web has so far created most of the wealth. So the potential of the other five is immense.

Implementation

In European Union countries where access to the Internet was the cheapest, as in the Nordic member states, the proportion of people connected to the Internet was the highest in 1999.

Claim

Everyday experience shows that people use the Internet to connect in three different ways: to reinforce existing relations among family, friends, and coworkers; to forge new relationships which can be quite intense, as shown by numerous reports of people falling in love online; and to join or form communities, some of which closely bind people who share an illness or an alcoholic in the family or some other serious challenge life has thrown their way.

Counter-claim

The Internet, the Web, is the number-one tool in the arsenal of capitalist globalization. The Internet is the first step in the pacification of all resistance, cultural and aesthetic, economic, journalistic, activist and all combinations thereof. By championing work on the Internet, progressives are acting as the first agents of gentrification - similar to the initial wave of artists who settled Soho in New York City twenty-five years ago so that it might become the shopping center for a hip and affluent international shopping class a generation later) for international conglomerates only interested in their stockholders returns and CEO's stock-options package.

In 1998, fewer than 10% of Europeans were connected to the Internet, as against nearly 25% of Americans. In June 1999, just 60 million Europeans were using the Internet, as compared to more than 80 million in the United States, which has a much smaller population than the European Union. Far more Finns and Swedes were connected to the Internet than Americans; but the picture was very different in the southern half of the EU, and more particularly in Greece and Portugal.

People who use the Internet cut themselves off from family and friends, diminish their social lives, and become isolated and lonely. The Internet could be the ultimate isolating technology that further reduces our participation in communities even more than television did before it.

Internet is really an instrument of information and communication only within a socio-cultural elite of a few million people and hence it is better described as a group medium rather than a mass medium.