'Loose Talk'
By Benjamin Benedict

The Internot

As I write I am listening to ‘The Who’ play ‘Who Are You?’ on ‘Live Earth’ which song apparently was a predictor of the Internet, or so they say. Well, I am a big fan of The Who, (they are now playing ‘Teenage Wasteland’ in the pouring rain) but I bet they didn’t also predict Internet becoming the ‘Internot.’

I am living in foreign parts and my laptop broke down about six weeks ago, so I have been using the local Internet Café for essential communications and the hundred or so people who normally hear from me every couple of weeks, have not.

One of those hundred actually emailed ‘are you alright?’ and about five others knew of my problem but the other ninety or so don’t appear to have noticed. Not that I have been without messages. Over a hundred items of detected spam have been received and just under a hundred other messages, fifty from companies I can’t get to stop mailing me, thirty from individuals or organisations who circulate articles, (not their own) or images, or links to sites of interest and under twenty messages actually intended specifically for me.

My provider has complicated matters by suddenly taking a hate on certain email addresses, which it won’t deliver to and it also has taken to censoring the emails I send and receive. I have therefore had to set up another email address with another provider, which so far isn’t such a control freak.

All of this gives a little insight into what the Internet has become, and it is far less than I had hoped. People send me messages that they think will amuse, excite, or somehow be of service to me, but from one month to the next I might not get personal news or opinion from anyone. What the Internet has become is a reference service and a way to book plane flights and buy things, and this is ok as far as it goes, but it is hardly living up to it’s potential and that is down to us.

 The Internet should provide a sharing of our high’s and low’s, particularly with those in far off places, and it should be a vehicle for real local and global democracy; real democracy, not the joke that we are presently stuck with. Every now and then, politicians talk about the decentralisation of power, of a handing over to local government. What they should be talking about is a handing over to us. 

The Internet should provide a forum in which information is provided about matters of local and national government, on which our opinion is then sought. This would not be voting as such, but the resulting information would be highly influential. It would also not be what you get from pollster’s carefully slanted questions. It would be a specific indication of opinion on specific subjects. What if a website had asked Americans after the confusion ending the last presidential election, ‘Do you think that the election should be re-run?’ What if?

Once or twice, sites have been organised to register objection or assent to this or that, when a government or organisation is obviously going against the public’s wishes, and the ones I know about have been most effective. This goes to show that what I am talking about is entirely possible, but like any kind of freedom, you only get it by fighting for it, and when it comes to democracy, we think that we already have it. It is a matter of degree. We have a sort of democracy, but we could have much more.

In a sense, it is a matter of culture; a change of habit and of what we expect of ourselves, and I suppose that I may simply be expecting too much too soon. The point is that up until now the door has been open. All we have needed to do is walk through. Doors, which are open, can close and as the years go by we can see the Internet succumbing to more and more control. No, you can’t send words like that, pictures like that, thoughts like that, and you can’t receive them either. Controls are needed, but now they are in place they are being abused, and it is because we have not made the effort to take control ourselves. Did we think that somehow we would not have to take responsibility for this gift? That the Internet was somehow different in that respect to every other technological enhancement that we have ever been afforded? Use it or lose it. Lose the freedom you could have had. The Internot is what we’ve got, and we righteously deserve it.

Send your opinions regarding Mr. Benedict's writings to bbenedict@netlistings.com