Douglas Adams in an 1999 article for the Sunday Times nails down a few things that are still as valid today as they were 6 years ago.
On Internet as a threat:
Newsreaders still feel it is worth a special and rather worrying mention if, for instance, a crime was planned by people ‘over the Internet.’ They don’t bother to mention when criminals use the telephone or the M4, or discuss their dastardly plans ‘over a cup of tea,’ though each of these was new and controversial in their day.
Replace crime with terrorism and you’re in 2005.
But a much more important part is the following, on trust, social filtering and human interaction. It is what social software helps you roll, live, and thrive with.
Because the Internet is so new we still don’t really understand what it is. We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that’s what we’re used to. So people complain that there’s a lot of rubbish online, or that it’s dominated by Americans, or that you can’t necessarily trust what you read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you hear on the telephone. Of course you can’t ‘trust’ what people tell you on the web anymore than you can ‘trust’ what people tell you on megaphones, postcards or in restaurants.
Working out the social politics of who you can trust and why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to do. For some batty reason we turn off this natural scepticism when we see things in any medium which require a lot of work or resources to work in, or in which we can’t easily answer back – like newspapers, television or granite. Hence ‘carved in stone.’ What should concern us is not that we can’t take what we read on the internet on trust – of course you can’t, it’s just people talking – but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on the TV – a mistake that no one who has met an actual journalist would ever make.
One of the most important things you learn from the internet is that there is no ‘them’ out there. It’s just an awful lot of ‘us’.
via Kevin Marks
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Beautiful. Thank You.
so true .. the last italicised part … was it Kevin who wrote that ?
Hi Jon,
That was Douglas Adams too.
Ton
Hi Ton,
Interesting to see you blog this today. It was one of the first things I blogged back in 2001 just after 9/11, (my second ever post in fact) and I’ve made numerous references since.
http://www.psybertron.org/?p=2
The truth is pretty constant.
Ian