The Internet: Tool of Illusion, or threat to the Establishment?
Brock A. Shaver
October 26, 2006
News reports say that terrorists are starting to use the Internet in more sophisticated ways to get their message out. Not only is it a communication network between the ringleaders, but also it is now being used to instruct jihadists in bomb making, with surprisingly sophisticated graphics, and translating their message into English to reach a wider audience.
It is ironic that the U.S. created the Internet during the Cold War so that its military communications system could not be knocked out by the Soviets. Now their enemy is using it against them.
The impact of the World Wide Web goes far beyond this paradox. It is restructuring the culture of the world as a whole. It is a double-edge sword of good and bad, depending on the special interest of the opinion.
The detractors like to point to the negatives. There is Spam, porn, a lot of bad blogs, and the irritating news that the two YouTube creators just sold their venture for $1.65 billion to Google. The site has only been in existence for one year and never made any money. It is popular, but the critics point to its low-brow home movies and copyright infringements. Plus, it has not introduced anything ‘new’ to the web to improve it.
Corporate America complains that the Internet is subverting its territory. Movies and music are being downloaded without payment, making common criminals out of teenagers. The acceptability of this disturbs those who fear they are losing money on their intellectual property and investment. It is funny that, in a culture that has converted from morality to values (a business term that respects the individual’s right to choose), this behavior has boomeranged on capitalism. Corporations are now pining for morality again, at least on the theft issue. They don’t seem to understand that the accessibility of ‘free’ material is the direct offspring of consumers turning on their radios and TV’s for decades, and getting it for ‘free.’ This mindset has just crossed over to the new ‘airwaves,’ the Internet.
This new common printing press, whose older version once revolutionized the world in the 16th century, and further still in the revolutions from 18th century onwards, is undermining the modern Establishment. What made the scientific and business revolutions possible, communications, is now depriving the elite of its power base, money. The elite does not control this democracy, and this disturbs them. Now business knows how the old kings felt when the merchants replaced them by the very same means.
Is it a bad thing to increase and globalize communications and publication at such a grass roots level? One writer complains it subverts professional journalism, writers, artists, etc. It de-thrones experts. Bad blogs, and blogs that just attract like-minded people has no value.
But business is adaptable if nothing else. It has a new venue to clutter people’s web pages with more crass advertisements than ever before. Advertising is not high-brow, but an intrusion. So lets not be hypocritical. The ‘Web 2.0,’ as it goes from the Microsoft-reliant home computer into its ‘Google’ marketplace phase, reflects how our culture has taken the last forty years of consumer mentality and used its principles and behaviors with this strange new venue. Resistance shows business loves its own freedom, but not the consumer’s.
Ten years ago, the ‘net’ was exciting because it was new and unregulated by either the government or business. It was obvious that phase would be short-lived, and now online gambling has been outlawed, police have been given a new area to grow their business (cyber crime), and so many sites are now locked-down with admissions fees, that the new frontier has been settled rather quickly. The wild has been tamed, to an increasing degree. Spam is now a crime. The U.S. government reviews the billions of emails sent round the world daily. Spyware is building a file on individuals on countless private sites. Everything and everyone is monitored and under control now. It’s a civilizing process.
There is no real political threat from the Web. The illusion that it connects people around the world may be true, but these are still individuals sitting alone in their homes doing nothing but spewing words. With 50 million blogs in existence, there is little to bring everyone together into a new political class or action. It has more of a splintering effect, further atomizing individuals in their anonymous suburbs with the comfort of feeling they have a voice that is being heard, but with little real and substantive effect. The elite should take comfort in venues like YouTube that entertain and stroke the masses with their 15 minutes of fame, before their ‘artwork’ is lost off the ‘recent posts’ front page into the millions of files.
It is interesting to talk with people from around the world from your den. It creates a ‘global’ community, exposing people to other cultures and helping to contribute to a planetary worldview instead of a local one. But is it really doing much more to create a shift in the psyche of civilization from the narcissus of national culture to a broader frame of reference? Not yet, anyway. Cultures are colliding right now because of the effects of the war on terror and the modern capitalist revolutions undermining traditional societies. It is still television and movies that are having the primary effect of broadening peoples’ views of the wider world collectively.
But the real test that the Web provides is on our education systems. Besides the ‘garbage’ on the Internet, it provides so much easy-access information from universities, texts from the greatest minds in history, science, the arts, etc., that it is a litmus test to see if our schools are creating educated individuals that can use this to enrich our culture. Are the cultural elites asking this question? Are their former students really creating anything substantial as they piece together the infinite bits of information from what is available? Or are they just entertaining themselves?
It is also an interesting window into the development of our knowledge culture. We have seen our society progress from a myth/story/religion-based psychology into the knowledge economy, which has further reduced to the information age, and increasingly broken down into the coming ‘data age.’ Academics call it ‘post modernism.’ Instead of thinking in terms of linear story, where we must turn every page of a book to get the whole story and meaning, we can now just click on the page we want, and read snippets of graphics that momentarily grab our attention. What ‘whole,’ or connections are individuals making from the sound bites on web pages? Consumerism, individualism, freedom and choice run up against the difficult work of expanding one’s mind by the challenge of great intellects.
This behavior combines with our ‘music video’ view of the world. Rapid images flashed before our eyes fills us with an impression, instead of a narrative we can comprehend and relate to in our mundane suburban reality. We used to interpret ‘who we are’ through Bible stories. The marketplace that bombards our consciousness with infinite advertisements on roadsides, TV’s on our gas pumps and in the mall food courts, and the overwhelming products we confront in a Wal-Mart have supplanted that. The strobe-light effect of massive amounts of information has been adopted by television shows like ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ the news, and commercials. The Internet at least gives us control over what we are hit with, and we can control the images and their speed instead of having them control us.
We are free to piece together whatever data we want, to create our own meaning in this complex, artificial world that we have created. In our concrete and asphalt jungles, where we require only money and a grocery store to survive, the choice in creating our meaning of life dramatically increases. We can pick and choose the bits of information we want to cobble together what we want to believe.
Political powers, in all its forms, distrust anyone that is not under its control for its own safety. It is the original civilized problem. Uncontrolled humans are dangerous. The human mind that is not confined to a set script can lead to challenging authority. This makes government and business nervous.
The Establishment should not worry. In the West, individuals are dependent on the elite to provide money for survival. The Internet is becoming a massive business opportunity. Few question the very core of our assumptions about how our society is run. Business has provided such comfort and security that our way of life is taken for granted. And the ease of which the U.S. government can undermine the bedrock of civil society, the suspension of habeas corpus to fight terrorism, shows that the electorate is still impotent, uneducated, and unorganized to defend the very legal protections against abuse of power against the individual. Dazzled and comfortable, citizens want to be left undisturbed so they can enjoy life. Give them the money to cycle it back to Corporate America and they feel satisfied. As long as the public does not feel that survival and ‘freedom’ are threatened by their political masters (both government and business), there is no fundamental insecurity for the princes of our society.
The Internet revolution rests on the foundation laid by the modern world in the last forty years. Individuals behave based on the behaviors and ideas developed from another time in history, consumer society before the Web. The consequences have come home to roost in this new reality. We assume that knowledge is good. We believe that our business-centered society is the best version of civilization yet devised. All of these factors combine as power tries to once again get control of another (globalizing) freedom of individuals.
It is a shift in the mental structure that makes our civilization work. The politics of the world is in massive flux right now. China and India are growing so fast that they will soon threaten the hegemony of the United States economically, and thus politically. Third World countries struggle with the social consequences of modernity seeping into their traditional ways of life. The environment degrades at an accelerated rate, and the elites have no real interest in saving it over their profits and power. It would also mean loss of jobs and money, which would destabilize the stability now enjoyed in the West.
The Internet is a thread that unites 6 billion humans in these early stages of emerging forces outside of it. By commercializing the Web, controlling it through a business agenda, the old model appears to be working to keep all this ‘talk’ under control. Combined with the atomizing of the individual and knowledge, no significant threats to the Establishment have reared its head yet.
But power remains suspicious of this sleeping giant of human communication. It should not complain about the Internet just yet. It can continue to bombard the individual with disconnected choice so that a bigger picture does not emerge for the bulk of the population. Our only serious social connection is our relationship with our jobs for money. Combined with infinite market choices, the old ‘divide and conquer’ takes a whole new twist in the subliminal mind game we are a part of.
The Internet, Western culture, and the environment are the three primary catalysts for creating a global consciousness. The Web and nature are still relatively sleeping issues. Corporations are in charge of the agenda. The Internet has potential, but business is very good at distracting us from what is deeper and more important for humans and their survival.
Superficiality in the public sphere is actually the real issue. Illusion is winning. We truly do not understand the future, the big picture, the truly global community with one environment and everyone communicating democratically for the common good. This is the most massive and dangerous transition of civilization ever. The old Establishment remains in charge. Power has always acted the same way. But the stakes have never been so high, nor have individuals held so much power, through communications and consumer spending. The issue is too big for most to ponder. We are all asleep in our bourgeois comforts. The Internet remains a toy, where serious knowledge is lost in billions of web pages, dependent on Google’s algorithms to show us what is important.
It is ironic that the U.S. created the Internet during the Cold War so that its military communications system could not be knocked out by the Soviets. Now their enemy is using it against them.
The impact of the World Wide Web goes far beyond this paradox. It is restructuring the culture of the world as a whole. It is a double-edge sword of good and bad, depending on the special interest of the opinion.
The detractors like to point to the negatives. There is Spam, porn, a lot of bad blogs, and the irritating news that the two YouTube creators just sold their venture for $1.65 billion to Google. The site has only been in existence for one year and never made any money. It is popular, but the critics point to its low-brow home movies and copyright infringements. Plus, it has not introduced anything ‘new’ to the web to improve it.
Corporate America complains that the Internet is subverting its territory. Movies and music are being downloaded without payment, making common criminals out of teenagers. The acceptability of this disturbs those who fear they are losing money on their intellectual property and investment. It is funny that, in a culture that has converted from morality to values (a business term that respects the individual’s right to choose), this behavior has boomeranged on capitalism. Corporations are now pining for morality again, at least on the theft issue. They don’t seem to understand that the accessibility of ‘free’ material is the direct offspring of consumers turning on their radios and TV’s for decades, and getting it for ‘free.’ This mindset has just crossed over to the new ‘airwaves,’ the Internet.
This new common printing press, whose older version once revolutionized the world in the 16th century, and further still in the revolutions from 18th century onwards, is undermining the modern Establishment. What made the scientific and business revolutions possible, communications, is now depriving the elite of its power base, money. The elite does not control this democracy, and this disturbs them. Now business knows how the old kings felt when the merchants replaced them by the very same means.
Is it a bad thing to increase and globalize communications and publication at such a grass roots level? One writer complains it subverts professional journalism, writers, artists, etc. It de-thrones experts. Bad blogs, and blogs that just attract like-minded people has no value.
But business is adaptable if nothing else. It has a new venue to clutter people’s web pages with more crass advertisements than ever before. Advertising is not high-brow, but an intrusion. So lets not be hypocritical. The ‘Web 2.0,’ as it goes from the Microsoft-reliant home computer into its ‘Google’ marketplace phase, reflects how our culture has taken the last forty years of consumer mentality and used its principles and behaviors with this strange new venue. Resistance shows business loves its own freedom, but not the consumer’s.
Ten years ago, the ‘net’ was exciting because it was new and unregulated by either the government or business. It was obvious that phase would be short-lived, and now online gambling has been outlawed, police have been given a new area to grow their business (cyber crime), and so many sites are now locked-down with admissions fees, that the new frontier has been settled rather quickly. The wild has been tamed, to an increasing degree. Spam is now a crime. The U.S. government reviews the billions of emails sent round the world daily. Spyware is building a file on individuals on countless private sites. Everything and everyone is monitored and under control now. It’s a civilizing process.
There is no real political threat from the Web. The illusion that it connects people around the world may be true, but these are still individuals sitting alone in their homes doing nothing but spewing words. With 50 million blogs in existence, there is little to bring everyone together into a new political class or action. It has more of a splintering effect, further atomizing individuals in their anonymous suburbs with the comfort of feeling they have a voice that is being heard, but with little real and substantive effect. The elite should take comfort in venues like YouTube that entertain and stroke the masses with their 15 minutes of fame, before their ‘artwork’ is lost off the ‘recent posts’ front page into the millions of files.
It is interesting to talk with people from around the world from your den. It creates a ‘global’ community, exposing people to other cultures and helping to contribute to a planetary worldview instead of a local one. But is it really doing much more to create a shift in the psyche of civilization from the narcissus of national culture to a broader frame of reference? Not yet, anyway. Cultures are colliding right now because of the effects of the war on terror and the modern capitalist revolutions undermining traditional societies. It is still television and movies that are having the primary effect of broadening peoples’ views of the wider world collectively.
But the real test that the Web provides is on our education systems. Besides the ‘garbage’ on the Internet, it provides so much easy-access information from universities, texts from the greatest minds in history, science, the arts, etc., that it is a litmus test to see if our schools are creating educated individuals that can use this to enrich our culture. Are the cultural elites asking this question? Are their former students really creating anything substantial as they piece together the infinite bits of information from what is available? Or are they just entertaining themselves?
It is also an interesting window into the development of our knowledge culture. We have seen our society progress from a myth/story/religion-based psychology into the knowledge economy, which has further reduced to the information age, and increasingly broken down into the coming ‘data age.’ Academics call it ‘post modernism.’ Instead of thinking in terms of linear story, where we must turn every page of a book to get the whole story and meaning, we can now just click on the page we want, and read snippets of graphics that momentarily grab our attention. What ‘whole,’ or connections are individuals making from the sound bites on web pages? Consumerism, individualism, freedom and choice run up against the difficult work of expanding one’s mind by the challenge of great intellects.
This behavior combines with our ‘music video’ view of the world. Rapid images flashed before our eyes fills us with an impression, instead of a narrative we can comprehend and relate to in our mundane suburban reality. We used to interpret ‘who we are’ through Bible stories. The marketplace that bombards our consciousness with infinite advertisements on roadsides, TV’s on our gas pumps and in the mall food courts, and the overwhelming products we confront in a Wal-Mart have supplanted that. The strobe-light effect of massive amounts of information has been adopted by television shows like ‘Entertainment Tonight,’ the news, and commercials. The Internet at least gives us control over what we are hit with, and we can control the images and their speed instead of having them control us.
We are free to piece together whatever data we want, to create our own meaning in this complex, artificial world that we have created. In our concrete and asphalt jungles, where we require only money and a grocery store to survive, the choice in creating our meaning of life dramatically increases. We can pick and choose the bits of information we want to cobble together what we want to believe.
Political powers, in all its forms, distrust anyone that is not under its control for its own safety. It is the original civilized problem. Uncontrolled humans are dangerous. The human mind that is not confined to a set script can lead to challenging authority. This makes government and business nervous.
The Establishment should not worry. In the West, individuals are dependent on the elite to provide money for survival. The Internet is becoming a massive business opportunity. Few question the very core of our assumptions about how our society is run. Business has provided such comfort and security that our way of life is taken for granted. And the ease of which the U.S. government can undermine the bedrock of civil society, the suspension of habeas corpus to fight terrorism, shows that the electorate is still impotent, uneducated, and unorganized to defend the very legal protections against abuse of power against the individual. Dazzled and comfortable, citizens want to be left undisturbed so they can enjoy life. Give them the money to cycle it back to Corporate America and they feel satisfied. As long as the public does not feel that survival and ‘freedom’ are threatened by their political masters (both government and business), there is no fundamental insecurity for the princes of our society.
The Internet revolution rests on the foundation laid by the modern world in the last forty years. Individuals behave based on the behaviors and ideas developed from another time in history, consumer society before the Web. The consequences have come home to roost in this new reality. We assume that knowledge is good. We believe that our business-centered society is the best version of civilization yet devised. All of these factors combine as power tries to once again get control of another (globalizing) freedom of individuals.
It is a shift in the mental structure that makes our civilization work. The politics of the world is in massive flux right now. China and India are growing so fast that they will soon threaten the hegemony of the United States economically, and thus politically. Third World countries struggle with the social consequences of modernity seeping into their traditional ways of life. The environment degrades at an accelerated rate, and the elites have no real interest in saving it over their profits and power. It would also mean loss of jobs and money, which would destabilize the stability now enjoyed in the West.
The Internet is a thread that unites 6 billion humans in these early stages of emerging forces outside of it. By commercializing the Web, controlling it through a business agenda, the old model appears to be working to keep all this ‘talk’ under control. Combined with the atomizing of the individual and knowledge, no significant threats to the Establishment have reared its head yet.
But power remains suspicious of this sleeping giant of human communication. It should not complain about the Internet just yet. It can continue to bombard the individual with disconnected choice so that a bigger picture does not emerge for the bulk of the population. Our only serious social connection is our relationship with our jobs for money. Combined with infinite market choices, the old ‘divide and conquer’ takes a whole new twist in the subliminal mind game we are a part of.
The Internet, Western culture, and the environment are the three primary catalysts for creating a global consciousness. The Web and nature are still relatively sleeping issues. Corporations are in charge of the agenda. The Internet has potential, but business is very good at distracting us from what is deeper and more important for humans and their survival.
Superficiality in the public sphere is actually the real issue. Illusion is winning. We truly do not understand the future, the big picture, the truly global community with one environment and everyone communicating democratically for the common good. This is the most massive and dangerous transition of civilization ever. The old Establishment remains in charge. Power has always acted the same way. But the stakes have never been so high, nor have individuals held so much power, through communications and consumer spending. The issue is too big for most to ponder. We are all asleep in our bourgeois comforts. The Internet remains a toy, where serious knowledge is lost in billions of web pages, dependent on Google’s algorithms to show us what is important.
Print
Email
