The concept I have to play around with today is the internet, the world wide web, and as usual my head spins wildly, grappling with the tails and tendrils, up-sides and down-sides of my subject, in this case, the biggest thing in human history.

The internet is the ultimate in the democratization of information(among other things of course, but in this article I will stick with the informational aspect of the beast.) Thanks to Google and the virtually limitless supply of wikis out there, anyone can be informed to varying extents about pretty much anything. At this stage of its the development the internet has become a yawning chasm, assimilating the world’s knowledge and regurgitating it on demand for our collective and individual edification, and, by and large, I think its great.

But not simply great. The role of information in our lives is enormous, and the way we acquire, evaluate and relate it to each other are fundamental considerations in our individual lives, as well as in our collective destiny. Something like the internet, which is irrevocably transforming all aspects of our relationship with information, is not something to be wandered blindly into, as most of the world appears to be doing. Internet is the new television, for many, even the majority of, people an excuse to refuse to do something meaningful with their lives, by engaging a socially acceptable addiction which bears a passing resemblance to reality. Social networking, to use a convenient example, can in some cases be a form of social onanism, people engrossed in relationships with entities as unreal as any soap personality, while taking comfort in the fact that they are not alone. Unlike t.v., one doesn’t even have to wait for tomorrow’s water cooler conversation to be reassured of the normality of one’s behaviour. Electronic heroin would be a nicely melodramatic name for it-but an apt one too, they resemble each other right down to the withdrawal.

Information is everything of which we are conscious. It’s not just the words on this page, or the bytes that make up an mp3, but also the sensation of your fingers on the mouse, the sound of the cooling fan in your ears and the smell of coffee in your nose. The internet supplies us with information from the most basic sensational level, to the highest echelons of our cognition. In terms of the acquisition of the information, the internet has only one advantage-ease of use. The volume of information on the internet found during a ten minute surf pales in comparison to that which we acquire during a ten minute outdoor walk. The internet really specialises in highly developed realms of information-the printed word, music, video. Here it comes into its own. It disseminates these media faster and more efficiently than any other tool. It also allows for their retrieval easier than could be imagined in a pre-Google world. Luddite that I am, I have two problems with this.

First of all it doesn’t allow for the accidental discovery of unexpected information. An internet search is done on specific terms-one doesn’t catch a glimpse of a book with an interesting title, or an article on an exotic subject while whacking the words ‘biodiversified haystacks’ into Google. As we move further from newspapers and libraries into blogs and portals we lose the breadth of knowledge that differentiates a wise person from an informed one. The onus will be on the individual to do this for themselves, and as incidental information becomes harder to find, less people will choose to do so. The kind of knowledge that our fathers and grandfathers had, a holistic wisdom with its emphasis on breadth rather than depth, may well end in this generation. In more practical terms, this will leave experts without the kind of context that gives real meaning to their work-a physicist for example, without any understanding of the philosophy that underpins his method, or a lawyer who fails to understand the sociological impact of his profession. The more powerful the web becomes, the less opportunity there will be for the minor epiphanies that spring from the discovery of a hitherto unknown interest. We will all be poorer for it.

Secondly, activities that were previously restricted to a location where certain documents, records etc were accessible, are now limitlessly mobile. Research can be done in bed, one can work on a tan and on accounts on the same hotel balcony-all that’s needed is a laptop and a wireless modem. We can work anywhere, but does this mean we should work everywhere? From my own limited experience, certain environments are designed for certain activities. I could easily do all my reading for college at home-just pull my materials out of databases instead of from musty shelves-but there is a genius loci (look it up, you’ll be glad you did)in the Trinity library that simply cannot be replicated in my own house(despite, or perhaps because of, the ready supply of tea and cushions.) In Trinity the shape of the building, the muffling of sound by the physical presence of so much knowledge, even the manual searching for each individual volume, all these have contributed to insights I could have found nowhere else. Which I’m sure is precisely what the architect intended…but what kind of buildings would he invent if their uses were as manifold as those of the internet itself? Could such a space be made? Would it even be wise to do so? Our buildings aren’t just a space for our bodies, but also for our minds(a rational explanation for the effect of feng shui) and the dissolution of barriers between where we play, learn and work will have a very definite and unpredictable effect on this.

It’s tempting to allow this article go sprawling away, like its subject, but restraint is always the preferred option in these circumstances. The problems with evaluation and relation of information are interlinked and already well documented-self-diagnosis based on unregulated sources being a prime example. I don’t want to deal with such practicalities. Instead I just wanted to look at some of the questions that spring from the fundamental idea of(to resurrect a defunct phrase) the information superhighway.

The internet is great. I would go as far as to say that without it, the challenges of climate change, energy crises, pandemics, loss of biodiversity and general global insecurity, would prove too great for the human race to overcome. Without such a pooling of our collective knowledge, the end of our species would be an even greater certainty. But it comes with dangers, and to embrace every stage of its development without question, would be a grave error. Already it has become an organic system, its growth, and the growth of its role in human affairs, is inexorably massive. There remains only each individual’s control over their own interactions with it. I would counsel caution, and advise anybody who has had the misfortune to read what I consider a very dry article to its end(seriously, not one flash of biting wit, I must getting soft) that the answer to the real question of our existence is unlikely to be the internet.

PS To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I am aware of the irony of the internet being my only means of promulgating this article to any meaningful extent.