My first computer was a clunky, unlovely contraption that squatted dully on the desk, a beige plastic behemoth. Unlike today’s lean, sleek, lighter-than-air laptops that you can balance on a fingertip, this computer was trapped in its thick shell like a toddler in a snowsuit.
Most of us can remember our first computer, just as we can recall our first kiss–or the first time we went on line. That too is a sort of kiss: A connection is made, a spark generated, and sometimes it leads to other things.
Like real-life romance, infatuations with the Internet feature an exhilarating variety of options and outcomes, of experiences and strategies. Yet the word “Internet” often is mistakenly employed as if it were a single, fixed entity, as if it were stuck in a static definition just as surely as that first computer of mine was mired in its plastic shell.
The latest illustration of the problem with invoking the Internet as a monolithic, undifferentiated entity was a recent study by the Stanford Institute for the Quantitative Study of Society. Based on a survey of 4,113 people in 2,689 households, the report warned that too much time spent on line could have a negative effect on social interaction and civic engagement, that we risk becoming a nation of maladjusted pudge-balls in swivel chairs.
But like a great deal of conversation about the Internet’s effects on society, the part of the study made public doesn’t specify exactly what survey respondents were doing on line. Were they playing a computer game whose goal is the simulated destruction of the Milky Way and adjacent galaxies? Loitering in chat rooms and dispensing misinformation about height, weight and income level? Scrabbling through Web site after Web site, scarfing up more information about an alleged celebrity wedding/divorce/liposuction?
Or were they visiting a virtual gallery or feeding a passionate curiosity about a 16th Century poem or responding to an e-mail from a long-lost childhood friend?
The Internet can do and be all those things and more, of course. You can write your own hypertext novel or order your turtlenecks from L.L. Bean.
There is an absolutely crucial difference between kinds of activities on the Internet, a difference so profound as to require us to stop saying “Internet” and expect to be understood. Some Internet experiences may be isolating, a portent of a grave and forbidding future; others, though, are gleefully interactive, endlessly inventive and perhaps even spiritually revitalizing.
My purpose is not to dog-pile on the Stanford study, as some have done with their defensive flurries of anecdote-driven rejoinders: “Hey, I use the Internet, and I have plenty of friends! Really! I can give you names!”
I think we need a new vocabulary with which to talk about the Internet, perhaps even a whole new paradigm through which to critique it, so that we can begin to explore the issues at the heart of the Stanford study: What might the capabilities of the Internet mean for the individual, the community, the world? With the Internet as the new engine of our minds, just where and how far can we go? How far should we go?
Unless we get rid of our sloppy thinking about the Internet, we’ll never know. That’s why it is so crucial for us to get this Internet thing just right: To refer to it as a single entity is not only to sell the technology short but to sell ourselves short too. It prohibits us from thinking clearly and creatively about a technology whose end, like the universe’s, we may never reach.
Had I the confidence of those self-appointed grammar gurus such as William Safire and James J. Kilpatrick, I would insist that we simply declare the word “Internet” an honorary plural. It might confuse folks for a while, just as “media” continues (drat–make that “continue”) to do, but everyone would catch on after a while, because it makes sense: The Internet does not exist.
Internets are what we have.
Soon, of course, my point will be true literally. In October, a consortium of business, universities, think tanks and government agencies announced the development of Internet2, a more technologically complex system to supplement the original Internet.
Asked what the Internet2 could do that the plain old Internet can’t do, Tom Kalil, chief of technology policy for President Clinton, told Salon magazine: “We not only want to attach computers to the Internet but also thermostats, microwave ovens or cell phones, for example. So you could send your thermostat an e-mail message saying, `I’m coming home in 20 minutes, and I’d like it to be warm by the time that I get there.’ “
Lest that sound too whimsical and domestic, Kalik also noted that the new Internet will enable scientists to communicate with spacecraft flung to distant targets. The National Science Foundation is the government agency most involved with the new Internet. Some high-tech companies, moreover, have been murmuring about the development of still a third Internet to handle strictly commercial transactions.
So there really will be multiple Internets. Until then, I hope we can acknowledge that, in effect, we already have them. I hope we begin to realize that saying someone is “on line” is spectacularly lame and unhelpful as a descriptor. It’s the equivalent of, when asked what someone is like, responding, “Well, she’s breathing.” Yeah–and?
The limitations of thinking of the Internet as a single entity are obvious in the current presidential campaign. Several times, commentators and candidates themselves have referred to the 2000 contest as “the first Internet campaign.”
The first time I heard that, I thought, “Wow!” But then I read the fine print, so to speak: I realized that the reference was mainly to lickety-split fundraising. Candidates’ Web sites have become just fancy new versions of direct mail solicitation. Take a look: The sites themselves are canned and flat. Sheer electronic boilerplate.
I can’t blame the candidates. We’re still figuring out how best to integrate the Internet into what we do and dream (or to integrate ourselves into the Internet’s capacities). I don’t know what the first real Internet election will be like, but I know it won’t be about fundraising alone.
The Internet–I’ll stick to the old nomenclature for now, until somebody figures out a better one–is the greatest leap forward for information dissemination since Gutenberg. In fact, it beats Gutenberg, because print, for all of its glories, is one-dimensional. The Internet transcends dimensionality.
The Internet? A figment, a fiction, a fantasy.
Behold the Internets: a search engine, a library that never closes, a slide rule, a bookstore, a catalog, a method of communication, a matchmaker, a literary genre, a clean sidewalk and a box of chalk. It’s not only the world’s new brain, but its legs and lungs as well.
It is–they are–a second universe, one that is, to paraphrase novelist John Fowles, as real as, but other than, the universe that is. We think of it as singular at our own risk.
