The Internet and The Human Spirit
Excerpt from “Why Knot?” Buy the book at Amazon
We are bombarded daily with news of hacking, identity theft, and scams. We see our nation becoming ever more polarized as people ignore non-partisan balanced reporting of news and instead focus on the web sites and cable channels that agree with their pre-set biases. The communities of common interest that the Internet made possible have become havens for bias and bigotry and closed mindedness.
Innovations developed for one purpose often end up producing opposite effects. Fire can warm and cook, but it can also destroy.
Misuse of the Internet should not blind us to the Internet’s potential.
We are shaped by our environment, and the Internet and social media constitute a new environment shaping everyone from toddlers to retirees, enabling new behavior, new ways to learn, and new ways for people to interrelate.
The human potential for mass destruction existed before the invention of the weapons that made it possible. The potential for people to submerge their identity and their individual reason in large-scale crowd hysteria existed before the invention of mass communication media.
But now, thanks to the Internet, we are learning that man also has the potential for large-scale reasoned discourse. Thousands or even millions of people can arrive at mutual understanding through dialogue. Ideas can be spread instantaneously in global forums where they can compete on the basis of their merit, and people around the world can work together on large-scale projects, just as they can play massively interactive videogames. In other words, the Internet reveals positive aspects of human nature that were never seen before.
Before the Internet, large numbers of people could work together only when regimented, disciplined, and controlled by a central authority. Without such control, large groups of people were dangerous and volatile, sometimes turning into irrational mobs. And mass communication — communication from one to many — could induce crowd hysteria at a distance, and one person’s nightmare could be projected onto many.
By enabling many to communicate with many, directly, without central control, the Internet reveals unexpected human potential for collaboration and community. I hope that today’s divisiveness is a transient anomaly.
