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by Andrew Starling

The Internet is changing human society, just as railways, cars and telephones changed it in eras gone by. It's also changing it very quickly. It took railways a couple of generations to sew far-flung cities together and create powerful, prosperous nations. It took cars a couple of generations to urbanise those cities, dilute their cores, and take over the countryside. But most of the effects of the Internet will be felt within a single generation - even a single decade.
October 11, 2000

Without doubt the most powerful influence of the Internet is on information flow. Suddenly all kinds of information can be digitised and passed on to millions of people in a few seconds. Everything from news to music, commercial proposals to protesters' meeting plans. This is new. Most of that information took hours or even days to be transmitted before, especially if there were many recipients.

Take news, for example. Top company executives routinely use the Internet to find out what's going on in their industry, because it's so immediate and can address their speciality head on. In the financial markets, only a loser would rely on newspapers and the TV when their competitors read news on the Internet a few minutes after it's happened.

This has already led to a trivialisation of newspapers and the TV - a process that began before the Internet kicked in, but which has now clearly accelerated. Newspapers and TV have reduced their serious news coverage and aim more for soundbites and entertainment. A few newspapers and some magazines have recognised they can't battle the Internet on immediacy but can compete on depth, so they've taken the analytical route. But only a few. The majority have turned trivial.

Free-flowing information is also taking its toll on copyright. Any news reported by one source can be rewritten and reproduced elsewhere on the Internet within a few minutes. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. The ramifications of easy distribution for music, books, and eventually for movies, are far greater.

Napster isn't dead, whatever the music industry says. A site that quadruples its user base over seven months can't be written off that easily. If the courts close it, something else will take its place, possibly based on ICQ or other peer to peer versions of the Internet. The demand is there.

Yet illegal copying of music has been going on for decades (just visit a cassette store in any undeveloped country) and probably isn't the huge threat that music chiefs make it out to be. It's easy distribution of material by a private individuals that's the real threat to the entertainment corporations.

A few years ago I wrote a novel called Pious in the Mornings. I wasn't a famous name, it didn't have a classic plot, and it wasn't the earth-shattering debut of an irresistible new talent (shame) so I couldn't get it published. But two months ago I made it freely available on the Internet (http://www.foxglove.co.uk/pious/) and it's already managed close to 1000 downloads.

I'm not about to single-handedly destroy the book publishing industry, but it clearly demonstrates the potential for an individual to short-circuit the regular corporate route of distribution.

Almost all the major entertainment companies need to control distribution to make money. In music and movies it's blatantly obvious, slightly less so in book publishing. The Internet challenges all that. It will inevitably change the relationship between artists, distributors and the public.

The exact nature of this change isn't easy to predict. My personal belief is that mainstream entertainment will continue pretty much as before, but art with less commercial value will boom, creating a vibrant leading edge of culture from individuals outside the control of corporations: artist to audience direct, just like things used to be in centuries gone by, but now with mass distribution. It's a significant change in the way society deals with the arts, and in turn the arts are a prime mover in altering the way we view the world. Freed from corporate restraint, they'll move it faster.

Have Laptop, Will Travel

Back in regular nine to five life, the Internet is already having an impact on day to day commerce, especially on the nature and distribution of work. Most of this influence is in the business to business arena, not business to consumer.

Consumer trade over the Internet is not a glorious goldrush. OK, there are some decent sectors - books, CDs and software. But the reason why all the big Internet consumer retailers have been battered by the stock markets is because their model isn't working as well as expected.

Online purchasing is taking off with a whoosh, not a roar. Consumers are scared by the insecurity of the Internet, and rightly so. It won't take off at phenomenal speed until somebody comes up with a new and almost foolproof method of protecting consumers from hackers.

But that's less of a problem with business to business transactions, where extra security isn't prohibitive and credit cards aren't used. Many businesses now use the Internet and similar telecoms protocols for sourcing components. Boeing is probably the best-known example. Others use it to outsource huge swathes of work.

This outsourcing breaks down national boundaries. London Underground (the public metro system) has outsourced almost all its data processing to India. They're not the only example: India is doing very well out of the Internet.

Closer to home, the Internet is allowing many employees to telework from whatever location they choose. I'm a good example of this. All my work is Internet-based and I barely use the telephone or snailmail, just email. I can pick up my laptop and work from any place with a phone line, including another country. I know of a dozen people in the same situation and I can only imagine there are already tens of thousands of us, soon to be millions.

All these Internet effects on work will have a great influence on society. They generally point to a redistribution of work (and the money that comes with it) out of established centres, such as Western cities, and into more remote areas. Teleworkers can operate in the deep countryside, beyond the range of commuters. International data centres can be placed in any country with a passable education system. The 'net' effect is probably a good one, redistributing wealth out of concentrated hotspots in the cities of the West and into the world at large.

But there's a social downside too. In the cities of the West we can already see deep poverty despite all the big money floating around, and the Internet is likely to segment society even further. Yes, I'm talking about the digital divide. People without computer skills and access to the Internet are falling behind. And since only around seven percent of the world's population currently has access to the Internet, there's a lot of falling behind going on.

The Internet is creating a new technical elite, the digerati, with little respect for national boundaries, salaries way beyond the norm (I heard one tale of doctors moved out of a San Francisco block to make way for dotcom professionals) and their own Internet culture independent of the mainstream. This too has deep social consequences. Society never finds it easy to accommodate a new power-group, and especially a young one that's in charge of what will ultimately become the world's most important medium. There's likely to be a backlash of fierce Internet-bashing soon.

Click Anywhere For Hot XXX Action

Perhaps this pounding will be on sex and pornography, the taboo side of the Internet, which still accounts for something like twenty percent of all personal data traffic and five percent of consumer ecommerce. We have created a mechanism for everybody with a computer and telephone line to access pornography with ease, irrespective of age and gender and without the barrier of sex shop seediness.

It's futile to think this will have no social consequences. The most repressed cultures in the world are already feeling its effects - and remember this has only been an issue for a couple of years. Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing is down to personal values, but one thing's for sure, the incredibly rapid changeover from restricted pornography to unrestricted pornography is going to have an explosive effect on many of the world's cultures.

The Same World Through Different Eyes

Our mental processes are changing too as we adjust to cope with this brand new medium. There are technical hoops to jump through if we want to get the most out of the Internet: send email attachments, get streaming Internet radio, create our own sites. We are forced to learn and understand technologies that only a tiny minority of people would have been interested in ten years ago. That's a change to society.

And we access the Internet as individuals, rarely as groups. We work alone and entertain ourselves alone. We write emails and talk less on the telephone - a different social interaction favouring different skills. We do not search for answers within a world of sparse information, we search for useful answers within an overloaded universe of useless information - again, a different skill requiring a different mental approach to what went before. The Internet is changing us as individuals, not just our society.

And yet, we're still at such an early stage. If the Internet were a car, right now it would have solid rubber tyres, a crank handle, mechanical brakes, and possibly a man with a red flag walking in front. Turbochargers, automatic gearboxes and airbags wouldn't even appear in inventors' dreams.

Yet within five years a lot of the Internet will go broadband, even wireless broadband under the new mobile protocols, capable of everything a TV can do and more. Already it's happening. In broadband households, Internet viewing is roughly equal to TV viewing, despite the limited availability of broadband sites. That box in the corner is destined to become a relic in upmarket households. Why mess around with fifty-seven TV channels when the Internet offers two thousand, plus any film on demand?

Two thousand video channels on the Internet? Great, but will there be anything worth watching?

I suspect the answer might be yes. Including documentaries about how quaint and old-fashioned the Internet was back in the year 2000, and how naïve we were not to see the awesome effect it was already having on our society.

That includes me. I'll be lucky if I've recognised half the influences the Internet will have on society. It's the other half that gives me that wonderful sense of anticipation.