Internet - A Medium or a Message? (Part XIX )

By Sam Vaknin
Author of "Malignant Self Love - Narcissism Revisited"

These essays were published by the Israeli (Hebrew) edition of PC
Magazine back in 1996, when the Internet was in its formative epoch.
I have left them essentially unchanged, except for a few minor
errata I corrected. I find time travel fascinating. It is
interesting to recall the mainstream view, ten years ago, about the
Internet, its goals, its role, and its future. So, here goes:

The Transparent Language

The Internet will become the next battlefield between have countries
and have-not countries. It will be a cultural war zone (English
against French, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Spanish). It will be
politically charged: those wishing to restrict the freedom of speech
(authoritarian and dictatorial regimes, governments, conservative
politicians) against pro-speechers. It will become a new arena of
warfare and an integral part of actual wars.

Different peer groups, educational and income social-economic
strata, ethnic, sexual preference groups - will all fight in the
eternal fields of the Internet.

Yet, two developments are likely to pacify the scene:

Automatic translation applications (like Accent and the Alta Vista
translation engines) will make every bit of information accessible
to all. The lingual (and, by extension ethnic or national) source of
the information will be disguised. A feeling of a global village
will permeate the medium. Being ignorant of the English language
will no longer hinder one's access to the Net. Equal opportunities.

The second trend will be the new classification methods of contents
on the Net together with the availability of chips intended to
filter offensive information. Obscene material will not be available
to tender souls. anti-Semitic sites will be blocked to Jews and
communists will be spared Evil Empire speeches. Filtering will be
usually done using extensive and adaptable lists of keywords or key
phrases.

This will lead to the formation of cultural Internet Ghettos - but
it will also considerably reduce tensions and largely derail
populist legislative efforts aimed at curbing or censoring free
speech.

Public Internet - Private Internet

The day is not far when every user will be able to define his areas
of interest, order of priorities, preferences and tastes. Special
applications will scour the Net for him and retrieve the material
befitting his requirements. This material will be organized in any
manner prescribed.

A private newspaper comes to mind. It will have a circulation of one
copy - the user's. It will borrow its contents from a few hundreds
of databases and electronic versions of newspapers on the Net. Its
headlines will reflect the main areas of interest of its sole
subscriber. The private paper will contain hyperlinks to other sites
in the Internet: to reference material, to additional information on
the same subject. It will contain text, but also graphics, audio,
video and photographs. It will be interactive and editable with the
push of a button.

Another idea: the intelligent archive.

The user will accumulate information, derived from a variety of
sources in an archive maintained for him on the Net. It will not be
a classical "dead" archive. It will be active. A special application
will search the Net daily and update the archive. It will contain
hyperlinks to sites, to additional information on the Net and to
alternative sources of information. It will have a "History"
function which will teach the archive about the preferences and
priorities of the user.

The software will recommend new sites to him and subjects similar to
his history. It will alert him to movies, TV shows and new musical
releases - all within his cultural sphere. If convinced to purchase -
the software will order the wares from the Net. It will then let
him listen to the music, see the movie, or read the text.

The internet will become a place of unceasing stimuli, of internal
order and organization and of friendliness in the sense of
personally rewarding acquaintance. Such an archive will be a
veritable friend. It will alert the user to interesting news, leave
messages and food for thought in his e-mail (or v-mail). It will
send the user a fax if not responded to within a reasonable time. It
will issue reports every morning.

This, naturally, is only a private case of the archival potential of
the Net.

A network connecting more than 16.3 million computers (end 1996) is
also the biggest collective memory effort in history after the
Library of Alexandria. The Internet possesses the combined power of
all its constituents. Search engines are, therefore, bound to be
replaced by intelligent archives which will form universal archives,
which will store all the paths to the results of searches plus
millions of recommended searches.

Compare this to a newspaper: it is much easier to store back issues
of a paper in the Internet than physically. Obviously, it is much
easier to search and the amortization of such a copy is annulled.
Such an archive will let the user search by word, by key phrase, by
contents, search the bibliography and hop to other parts of the
archive or to other territories in the Internet using hyperlinks.


(continued)

Sam Vaknin ( http://samvak.tripod.com ) is the author of Malignant
Self Love - Narcissism Revisited and After the Rain - How the West
Lost the East. He served as a columnist for Global Politician,
Central Europe Review, PopMatters, Bellaonline, and eBookWeb, a
United Press International (UPI) Senior Business Correspondent, and
the editor of mental health and Central East Europe categories in
The Open Directory and Suite101.

Until recently, he served as the Economic Advisor to the Government
of Macedonia.

Visit Sam's Web site at http://samvak.tripod.com