Can you believe that it was not that long ago (perhaps the mid ’90’s) when the World Wide Web, now known as the Internet, came to the attention of the common man?
Wow, has the world changed in the past twenty-five years!!!
In 1994, Netscape came out with the first commercial Internet browser, there were ten thousand websites (mostly academic, governmental and military), and maybe two million computers connected to the Internet worldwide. Today, there are an estimated 45 billion Web pages and at least 3.2 billion Web users, most of whom have a Web-connected “smart phone” on their person.
It is hard to fathom that twenty-five years ago the Internet was, essentially, non-commercial. The ubiquitous Microsoft 95 operating system for personal computers was released back then without an Internet browser. Incredibly, Amazon, Google, Facebook and all of the other current behemoths that have hugely monetized the Web, and affected everyone’s life, didn’t exist at all!
I can remember that, up until the early 2000’s, the Wall Street jury was out on whether lots of money could be made using this clever, but unproven, technology.
Just one generation later, we live in a world where seemingly everything is connected to the Internet and seemingly everyone in the world has this technological miracle at their disposal…for good or for bad.
Therein lies the rub, in my opinion.
For one thing, the Web has provided the opportunity for an army of fraudsters, quacks, impostors, tricksters, cheaters, and organized crime types from all nations to establish a potential beachhead in virtually every home, purse and pants pocket throughout the developed world. It is criminal how easy it has become for these folks to fleece the flock.
P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute!” Yes, there is, and it’s amazing how stupid some of those suckers are.
Another problem with the Internet is that is has no filter, or, at least, marginal filtration. This allows people of all races and creeds, the rich and the poor, and the educated and non-educated to broadcast their opinions (like I’m doing in this blog!) pretty much instantly…to the world. This is a cool thing, unless the broadcaster says something in error or accidentally blurts our something offensive or just makes a stupid statement that he or she instantly regrets.
Too late, Dude, it’s “out there”, for all to ponder and wonder what the f… the person was thinking. How embarrassing!
Instant opinion messaging via Twitter offers everyone an opportunity to shoot from the hip, spread gossip, and opine witty and, often, hurtful things about others. Whatever happened to “Count to ten” before opening one’s yap?
In my opinion, the greatest downside to the Internet is the ease by which disinformation can be disseminated. It is possible for some bogus “fact” to be introduced into the Web, anonymously, and for that fake information to be spread all over the world within minutes.
The phenomenon of something “going viral” (in essence, quickly gaining a huge cult following), is nothing more than gossip gone amok. “Did you see…?!” or “Did you hear…?!” or “Everyone’s talking about…” something outrageous that appeared on Facebook, U-Tube, Twitter, or the like.
For example, back in January, a video surfaced supposedly showing a Tesla self-driving vehicle crashing into another test vehicle. This was an immediate “news” sensation, the video went viral, and Tesla shares suffered. The problem with this news scoop: Tesla has no self-driving model. It was later determined that the viral video was produced by a Russian firm that was hired by Tesla competitors to damage consumer confidence in Tesla.
In 2003, a fake Associated Press announcement on Twitter stated that President Obama had been injured in a bomb blast. This caused an immediate drop in the stock market. The news was bogus, but the impact on Wall Street was real, if short-lived, and could have enriched the perpetrators of the hoax, if that was their aim.
In the old days, it took awhile for actual news to ferment; i.e., become ready for dissemination. In that interval, between an event and publication, there was the opportunity for fact-checking, editing of the story for bias, and such. Nowadays, the public appetite for, and expectation of, immediate gratification is such that anything that smells at all like “news” is put on the Web…ASAP…for the purposes of scooping everyone else, getting “likes” on social media.
The public’s ravenous appetite for titillating and salacious information helped Russian cyber spies manipulate the 2016 Presidential election. Carefully planted fake news (of a political nature) was disseminated into American communities, like a plague, by an orchestrated network of hacked computers. Then, regular folks like you and I spread the propaganda among our friends via social media, not knowing that we were being used.
The quickness and ease by which disinformation is broadcast via the Internet encourages and enables bad actors to spread dangerous ideas. It is obvious that young, impressionable people throughout the world are being mobilized via the Internet by faceless recruiters to become terrorists. This has sparked a wildfire of hate crimes and mass murders here in the United States and, of course, the ongoing strife between the Muslim world and, seemingly, everyone else.
Recruiting mentally imbalanced and socially-deprived individuals to do the devil’s work has, unfortunately, never been easier. How many Manchurian Candidates (i.e. brainwashed fanatical killers) are walking the streets beside us, pre-programmed for terror, with their fuse already lit? It is a scary thought.
In this aspect, the wonderful potential of the Internet has been corrupted into a savagely cruel Pandora’s Box of horror.
One wonders if civilization will survive this particularly technology.