Impacts of the Internet

I love the web and the many opportunities it provides. I think it will be seen as one of the most important steps in the development of the human race because it allows so much interaction among so many different types of people. It boils communication down to its most pure and immediate form.

Along with all of these opportunities are new issues and new applications for our existing media. The Internet provides quicker, cheaper publication. It allows for faster communication between individuals and also allows that communication to be free from physical bias.

We are just now beginning to learn some of the down-sides to this faster, cheaper, better avenue including the removal of non-verbal signals and cues in our communication and whole new categories of crime.

With this new tool for communication there are many strategy readjustments that people and specifically commercial enterprises are making. The web is changing how people view the world and their place in it and companies are slowly but surely adapting to that. Also, with the web being in the almost new-born stage that it is in right now, it's a great time to be involved in its development. The things we do with the web in the next few years will shape the way humans relate to each other for the next hundred years. I couldn't be more excited about working in any area.

The Internet as we think of it now, is mostly made up of different sites hosted on millions of different computers around the world. The user accesses these "host" computers and reads the sites hosted there. In this system, distance is not an obstacle in communication. I can read a paper written by a high school kid in China as easy as I can read my local newspaper, possibly easier.

One major advantage of Internet-based communication is the speed with which people can publish and send information. Prior to the onslaught of the Internet in the early 90's communication, specifically publication, was restricted by time and cost. Also many groups and publications had to be more mindful of creating content that their sponsors and/or advertisers agree with.

To publish a color pamphlet about the damages to the rain-forests from logging a group had to raise money to pay for printing. This was based on the number of pages, photos, colors and number of total to be printed (possibly postage if they aren't a non-profit or another exempt group). These groups would have to appeal for donations from supporters and/or government programs. They had to find a large number of people who agreed with their message AND had money that they were willing to give to support the efforts of this group.

Groups sometimes could turn to sponsors from the private sector or even like-minded advertisers. Again, it was necessary for the message presented to be consistent with the company's own ideas and agendas. If the ideologies weren't consistent, our little group has to go in search of others to help pay for there costs.

Now, once our group has all the money they need to pay for their pamphlet, they have to print it. So, they send in their final drafts to the printer who says they will be ready in one week. This limits what our group will want to say in their pamphlet. They don't want to tell about any events or rallies before two weeks from now. Otherwise they will waste their printing space and ultimately waste their money that they spent all this time raising.

So they only tell about a couple of events two weeks from now and a few bigger events next month. They also want to put an update of what happened at the rallies they just had this week. They put photos and a write-up on the last page. So, even though the rally just happened this week, people won't get to read about it until it's two weeks old. They won't be able to do anything for the one next week until their next pamphlet. Also our group is an ecologically conscious group and request that their pamphlet be printed on recycled paper, which adds cost and cuts down the number of copies they can print.

Finally, a week later, the pamphlets arrive. Our group spends the night addressing and stamping so they can send out the pamphlets the next day. They drop them off at the post office and then the people on the mailing-list receive them in a few days. If there is an error or a typo it will have to remain. There is no way for our group to correct anything now.

Total time from writing to reading is nearly two weeks, give or take. Not very current. Of course newspapers are able to shorten this delay to only a day or even half a day. However, a newspaper has many more advertisers and editors and even the community itself to answer to. The paper has to present an ideology that all of these people will agree with, if they don't they risk losing the money to operate. Our group only answers to its own members and because of lower costs for printing only has a single private sponsor to answer to.

Now we skip to present day. Our same little group still wants to publish updates and newsletters, but now their time and costs are cut to almost nothing and their restrictions are lessened. The group has to purchase a computer, but this is a one-time cost unlike the recurring costs every time they wanted to publish before. They must also have access to the Internet, a minimal cost, easily circumvented if any of them are students. Now, any software they need can easily be found and downloaded over the Internet for free. So the group registers a domain name for $70 and they are now known as treehuggerz.com.

They can now publish a pamphlet anytime they want and the people on their mailing-list can get it instantly. There's no extra cost for color and no need to worry about killing trees for paper. Also their audience can expand beyond their mailing-list. Before only people who actually had a copy could read their letter, so the group was limited by the number of copies they printed. Their message could only get so far. Now anybody who logs into treehuggerz.com can read what they have to say, thus a bigger audience. Messages can also be updated instantly. They can update a location change for tonight's rally on their page and have it available in time for people coming to the rally to know about it.

They are also no longer as limited in the ideology that they can express. Even though our group only had one sponsor they still had to watch what they said so they didn't lose his help. Now they can endorse tree-spiking or vandalism because they can more easily support publication themselves.

I think that the internet allows voices that previously were not heard or at least not heard as loudly in the market-place of ideas to join in the discussion. Places like 2600.com (a hacker site) or theonion.com (a faux newspaper) can publish to more people for less money. I like the idea that all ideas should be able to at least be heard, then the stronger ones will be sustained and the weaker or less intelligent will fall by the way-side.

The Internet is speeding up our hegemony. We can cycle through ideas quicker because we have easier access to more information from more sources. This may not stay the rule. As AOL merges with Time-Warner and MCI-World Com merges with Sprint, our avenues for obtaining this information become less and less varied, but hopefully we as a society can prevent any sort of major stifling of voices as we take the marketplace of ideas on-line and into a global community. on-line.

Publication is not the only place where the Internet is increasing communication speed. One-on-one interpersonal communication has developed a quicker turn around thanks to the information super-highway. When I send a letter to a friend across the country it takes a little while to get there, then if they write back right away, a few more days to receive a reply. If it was more important and couldn't wait, I could use airmail or another more expensive mail service or I could call them on the phone. Calling on the phone, while immediate and more personal, costs a bit more than a letter, so I wouldn't phone my friend in New York everyday for no reason.

Along comes e-mail. Now the whole balance of priority and importance as applied to telephone and letters is pointless. E-mail raises the bar for timeliness and it increases expectations of contact. But, even with the increased volume and speed of mails, contact is becoming less and less personal.

With e-mail there is no lag time between sending and receiving. Correspondence can include many letters back and forth in a single day. Something becomes old news much quicker than it has in the past. Television obviously shortened the newsworthy time-span of any particular story, but with the adjunct of the Internet, that window is much smaller.

Often by the time a story airs on CNN or the local news, I've already heard it, talked about it and forgotten it. I remember once when I was surfing the net, I loaded a page and when I came back to the main page it had been updated with a breaking story. I turned on CNN and had to wait for them to finally cut in with a breaking news update.

I think that as we get more and more globally connected, people become less and less patient. Being so used to immediate delivery of information and correspondence, waiting even 30 seconds seems like a laborious task. Our attention spans seem to artificially shorten each time we make a technological advance. I hate waiting even 10 seconds for a page to download, I can't even remember what must have been the excruciating pain of using a modem earlier than a 14.4.

I guess this trend is an old one. We've always been concerned with making things faster. While I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, I do think this is creating an artificially inflated impatience.

E-mail has replaced so many things in my life. I use it as a substitute for actual letters, phone calls or cards. I need to talk to my mom: e-mail. I need to talk to a buddy: e-mail. I need to know what some account number is from home: e-mail. More and more, all of my daily contacts are through e-mail. This is not necessarily the case for a large portion of the country, but I do believe it is becoming more so.

A recent CNN poll claimed that 78% of the people who use the Internet daily do so through e-mail. Millions more people gain access to the Internet everyday. This increase lends a shift towards globalization, but more importantly, it creates an atmosphere where information, even trivial as it may be, can be sourced and accessed worldwide.

This quicker communication also has the advantage of coming at a lower cost. Currently I pay one monthly lump sum for connection to the Internet. The ISP's don't charge rates based on distance and only a few charge based on time. I think though that this might change in the very near future. I think that ISP's might eventually figure rates based on the amount of data transferred rather than distance. In any event, right now, I can talk with friends all over the globe without running up an expensive phone bill. The Internet allows users to have immediate response contact for almost no cost.

Another advantage of the Internet is that it eliminates many barriers such as race and religion. Communication on the Internet, or rather the bulk of it, takes place without any physical presence. Users interact and discuss topics with no idea what the other people look or sound like. This has many impacts.

One major impact is that people relate only based on their ideas. Attraction in a physical sense is a non-factor in discussion and debate. Academic discourse strives for discussion free of bias based on any type of physical characteristics. I believe that while this can take place in the "real world," certain characteristics can still discredit someone's arguments or ideas in the minds of the general public.

Stephen Hawking would be an obvious exception to my assumption, but I still believe that race and sex are factors too deeply ingrained in our collective psyche, that they affect us without our knowing it. We have been taught, by advertising, movies, television, magazines, etc., all our lives that attractive people are better and/or smarter than non-attractive people. Most people learn much of what they know about physical & mental handicaps through the media, and the media almost never presents those in a positive light.

The only way to be sure that we as a society are discussing issues based purely on the strength of the facts and reasoning is to remove any physical input from the discourse.

The Internet does just that. It removes physical input from the discourse. At CNN, I mind message boards where people from all over the world discuss relations in Ethiopia, Austria, Russia, Zimbabwe and so on. These people, while not always polite or even civil, are able to discuss issues free of any physical biases they may have (whether they want to or not).

People are able to make contacts and build relationships across the globe, without ever actually meeting face to face. The group I work with at CNN is almost entirely remote staffers; each lives in a different city all over the country. Many of these people have been with CNN for a number of years, some since 1994, which is a VERY long time in e-time. Yet almost NONE of these people have ever met in real life. We all knew about each other, what we liked, who's married, who has kids, but we'd never seen each other.

CNN held a Remote Staff Conference in Atlanta. We all finally got to meet and talk in person. It was a very interesting weekend from a sociological/communication point of view. It was very much like a high school reunion, I knew that I knew these people but I couldn't figure out who I knew. Once we all had nametags it was much easier. There was an awkward period of feet shuffling as people tried to figure out who they knew. Some of us looked very odd hanging out together (soccer moms and computer nerds), but none of that mattered because the relationships had been established ahead of time. It was good to see.

I think the removal of non-verbal signals can be good, because it forces people to deal with each other without relating first to their physical attributes. However, I think this also can create unrealistic expectations and a false sense of closeness.

I think that the removal of non-verbal signals when communicating on-line opens a wide door for misunderstanding and misinterpretation. I don't think that people realize how much of what�s being said can be lost without the non-verbal cues we've come to rely on. Inflection, body language, eye contact are all lost in on-line communication as we know it today. I wish there was such a thing as a "sarcasm font."

We've all seen stories on talk shows of people who meet on-line and then fall in love and get married within a week. People meeting on-line seem to "mainline" the other person's personality. Instead of processing the relationship through their normal filters, they get a very concentrated version of what the other person is like. Due to the speed with which they get to know each other and due to the fact that many of these couples are separated by long distances, neither has time to acclimate to the other's idiosyncrasies because there is no traditional courtship. The couple is very open to disruption from things that most couples meeting in real life would have already overcome by the time they are married.

I don't think that the Internet will destroy marriage as we know it, nor do I think these couples are destined to fail in their relationship. I do think however they represent a very real and very growing aspect of the influence and affect of the Internet now on the cusp of the 21st Century.

I like the fact that the Internet allows communication between people who are geographically isolated. The Internet allows people who barely speak the same language. I deal with many message boards at CNN that deal with non-English speaking countries. CNN requires everyone to use English when posting on the boards, but occasionally, someone will post a short message (one or two lines) at the end of their post in another language.

Rather than delete the whole message I try to find a translation of the phrase or lines. I sometimes use bablefish.com (part of alta-vista.com) to translate for me. Lots of times it's just a greeting or farewell, which I let stay. Sometimes, however, it's an attack aimed at someone on the board. When it's an attack the message gets hidden. French, Spanish and German are easily found. I wish I could find a site to translate every language, or at least the many Pakistani and Indian languages.

But even when all are using English, the very fact that these are different cultures presents obstacles. On one of my boards recently ("The Battle for Chechnya") one of the Russian posters offered a joke. I did not get it...at all. It's not that it wasn't funny, I couldn't figure out what was supposed to be funny. It was just a story. No punch-line, no gag, it was just a story.

Things like this are common when people who are from different countries or cultures try to communicate. Communication with this guy is still possible and we can understand each other perfectly, but we are using a different set of filters (signifieds) to translate between us. I like that the net makes occurrences like this more common. The more people are able to interact with those from other cultures in a meaningful and positive way, the more positive signifieds they have about the rest of the world. Slowly but surely the walls are chipped away.

Many cultures take many non-verbal cues differently. What one considers acceptable another may consider quite rude. The Internet allows for circumventing this particular obstacle. No need to worry about taking off your shoes inside or about how low to bow when your meeting is a teleconference.

We are as a global society are in the midst of constant change and reformation. Borders and countries change daily. The Internet is allowing more and more interaction across those borders. I don't think that we will be able to consider ourselves a unified global community any time soon, but should that time ever come, we can look back on the development of the internet as one of the major steps in getting there.

Also as a more singularly defined global culture, the Internet presents some very interesting additions to the free speech debate. Since its inception people have viewed the Internet as a completely free and unregulated entity. People have been using the Internet to circumvent numerous U.S. laws. Things such as copyright violations, hate speech, child pornography, et al. have been commonplace since the birth of the net. There are more than a few major issues that have yet to be settled regarding the who and how of regulation and punishment of these offenses. Who has jurisdiction? Whose laws apply? Where does the violation actually take place?

There are very few cases dealing specifically with net-based crimes. We have a few cases involving Prodigy and their liability for what their users post. A man in Germany claimed that he was defamed by some postings on a message board. He brought suit against Prodigy in Germany. He claimed that the offense took place in Germany because his reputation was damaged there, not in the United States where the messages are hosted. The case was settled before it actually went to trial, but it does offer a very convincing argument for jurisdiction. Where does the crime actually take place?

Besides defamation is the more popular and much more rampant copyright violation. These are everywhere. Images on the net are quite easy to swipe and the safeguards, like digital watermarks, can be removed rather quickly. Mp3's (net based sound files) are hugely popular. Trading communities like Napster have come under scrutiny lately because many in the recording industry feel it promotes pirating of music, which it does.

Recently Mp3.com was found guilty of copyright infringement in a suit brought by a record company. The heavy metal band, Metallica, has recently brought suit against Napster. However, Napster is defending itself with the argument that it is only providing an avenue for people to trade sound files and they cannot be held responsible for the abuses of their software.

I don't think this argument will hold much weight, but it has yet to make it to a court. This seems to echo the Prodigy situation. The provider of the service can be held responsible for the harm that comes from patron abuse of it. Though just this past week the US Supreme Court refused to hear another case involving Prodigy. They allowed a New York appellate court ruling that said Prodigy was not considered the publisher of remarks on its message boards to stand.

Some artists and labels have begun a pre-emptive strike against the pirating by offering Mp3's themselves. Some of my favorite bands offer entire concerts in Mp3 format absolutely free. Because Mp3's are of such high quality, they can be burned onto CD. I now have more than enough live Pavement Mp3's; thus I have no desire to fill my hard drive up with more.

One of my favorite topics involving the Internet is the issue of privacy. How much information should people be able to find out about you? Currently there are many very useful web-sites for finding information about you. I don't know of any current legislation dealing specifically with the issue of Internet privacy, but I expect it won't be too far along. There are places to find out what newsgroups you post to, what your address is, how much you paid for your house, what your kids' names are...everything. It�s kind of scary really. I've done searches on myself, just to see what could be found out about me. I must say I was surprised at the volume.

Currently, efforts by the U.S. law enforcement community focus on end-users who download illegal materials to their own computers. Any law that the United States passes will only apply within its borders and Web-sites can easily avoid this by hosting a site in another country, where the laws are a little more lax. However, end-users are bound by whatever the laws are in the country they are in.

But another problem with that is how to detect who is breaking the law? I am not very sure of the capabilities of the government (I'm sure they would like it to remain this way) to detect e-crime. It seems very intensive and laborious, even impossible and illegal, to keep track of all e-mails and downloads, not to mention scanning them for possible violations. So our current situation is filled with very gray areas.

Earlier legislation was struck down as unconstitutional. I think the Supreme Court is going to be very protective of the Internet. I think the justices are interested in maintaining free speech on-line. I really doubt that there will be much, if any, prior restraint allowed on-line. I know that there are many representatives in Congress that are more than ready to rigidly regulate the net in order to protect children. While I agree that those are noble intentions, I think their methods are sacrificing too much personal freedom.

Questions of legality and jurisdiction on the Internet are some that will be debated for many years. The Internet is growing exponentially and with it the opportunities for abuse and e-crime. We as a society are going to have to define what we consider crime on-line and what we will accept as viable ways to police it.

One of the interesting things about this debate is that it is an international one. The reaches of the Internet pass boarders and boundaries; the people of the global community will have to find some common ground legally and morally.

I think we, as a global society, are at a very important juncture in our understanding of communication and society. It will be very interesting to see just how we decide what constitutes a crime on-line and who will be authorized to police and punish these crimes.

I really am excited to be working in this field at this time. There's so much potential for change, growth and integration. The potential is quite inspiring.

I love being able to see new arms of the media develop so rapidly as they have been with the on-slaught of the Internet. Design companies and .com's have flooded television with advertising. Every major network, movie, TV show and even the not-so-major ones all have their own .com.

I think that right now we are in the "Golden Age" of the Internet. Everything is still, pretty much, free and there really aren't very many rules or regulations. This situation won't last forever, but hopefully when regulation of the net occurs, it will be done wisely and it will help the Internet to grow and flourish.

05-3-00