Isaac Asimov once wrote a murder mystery set in the distant future. This future society differed from ours because technology had led people to shun physical contact. If you wanted to meet someone, you used a machine to project a perfect hologram of yourself into his or her living space. The technology was so flawless that you seemed to be present in the flesh. The murder occurred, and baffled all but Asimov's super-detective, because the murderer did the unthinkable. He visited his victim in person.
Asimov's world is still science fiction. But we do have a technology -the internet- that is promoting virtual interactions in a quite different way. Instead of life-size holograms, we gaze at text and pictures (and sometimes little faces in windows) on our screens. But the principle of bypassing real human contact is the same.
Whenever I pass an internet café, and see rows of people communing not with each other but with grey abstractions on their individual screens, I wonder if we have not already perfected a kind of hell on earth. A recurring nightmare, since Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, is that machines would eventually dominate their makers. In an unexpeted way, this is perhaps already happening with the internet.
Don't make the mistake of imagining that the internet is just a technological innovation - something that just makes data miraculously easy to obtain. Every technological breakthrough -from the wheel to television- was simultaneously a social innovation.
Libertarians (and they are often over-represented in cyberspace) often assume that social institutions that emerge spontaneously -products of human action but not of human design- are necessarily a good thing.
But the fact that no government agency planned the internet in its present form (or even imagined its emergence) does not make it necessarily desirable. A series of well-intentioned actions can have unfortunate cumulative effects; for instance, individuals trying to be thrifty can plunge an economy into depression.
I have a theory (which empirical psychologists can dismantle at their leisure): the kind of person most intensely attracted to the web is the kind of person who relishes the anonymity and -in a certain sense- freedom of the big city. The web is the ultimate big city in that it brings huge numbers of people together but only after first relieving them of their social identities.
On the internet we remain isolated even when we meet others: atomistic individual meets atomistic individual in a parody of the deracinated form of social interaction that economists regard as normal. And, as in the big city, we enjoy at least the illusion of privacy. The thought is: nobody is looking, so I can do what I please. I can ignore social conventions because they don't exist here in cyberspace.
In the small village everyone knows everyone, and there is nowhere to hide. The result is that individuals tend to master their private passions and respect social norms. But in the big city, social oversight disappears. Private passions overwhelm individuals and every form of crime and social disorder flourishes.
If the web were the ultimate big city, you would expect online behaviour to be disproportionally ego-gratifying. And this seems to be the case. Last year a US survey found that a third of all internet visits were to sexually-oriented websites, chat rooms and news groups. Yahoo, the internet group, apparently offers 469 categories of sex on 3,407 sites. And in the US, cybersex addiction is recognised as an increasingly serious clinical condition, linked to the breakdown of families and loss of jobs.
I don't draw attention to web pornography to condemn it, just to illustrate the kind of behaviours that the medium encourages. When social restraint is reduced to a minimum, as it is on the internet, passions are bound to dominate. It is so much easier to click a mouse than to find a back street shop in a real city; and there is so much less chance of being seen.
If freedom were really just a matter of gratifying our desires, the anonymous atomistic interaction that the web encourages would not be a source for concern.
But is enslavement to desire true freedom or did the Greeks have a point when they emphasised freedom's social and moral components? Nothing could be further removed from the face-to-face physical being together of the Greek polis than atomistic screen-based interaction.
I have been accentuating the web's negatives. There is a positive side as well, illustrated by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's recent decision to put most of its course materials -lecture notes, problem sets and so forth- on the web for free. Taken at face value the move seems to be motivated by the anti-profit, sharing philosophy associated wiht the "open source" software movement.
A battle for the web's soul thus seems to be under way. On one side there are libertarian profit maximisers who delight in the atomistic, self-interested interaction that it encourages. On the other, there are those inspired by the "public good" characteristics of the commodity in which the web's comparative advantage is the greatest: knowledge. Knowledge is a special good because my consumption of it does not reduce what is available for you.
This is what makes the web potentially a big city with a difference. It is a big city that need not serve principally as a means for the anonymous pursuit of private gain, but which could also promote sharing and altruistic behaviour. It could yet become a big city that brings individuals together rather than atomising them.
Used without permission, © 2001 Michael Prowse, Weekend Financial Times (week-end 28/29-Apr-2001).