Kort Explores conundrums of the human condition

The coverage of the Internet on the mainstream media has take a turn of late. Where the Internet was once the darling of the media, and advocating universal access a favorite egalitarian cause, any mention now is more likely to be complaining about the information available on the net. Small newspapers and independents have taken to launching their articles onto the net, tweaking the noses of larger competitors. Proud of their fading "first on the scene" claim to fame, TV stations are finding that their "breaking" news stories now often turn out to be after the fact reactions to information already circulating on the net.

The increasing impact of the Internet on everyday life is all the more significant considering that industry pundits estimate only around 30% of American households have computers and less than half of those have access to the Internet. The virulence with which government and media figures have recently attacked the Internet is an indication of how much they fear the free flow of information that so threatens their ability to manipulate public opinion.

Demands to censor and restrict information on the Internet will likely increase in the future. Totalitarian governments around the world already heavily restrict access to the net in order to "protect" their citizens from "harmful" information, and there are self proclaimed "defenders of public safety" in the governments of most supposedly free nations demanding similar restrictions.

Knowledge is power, and control over information has always been useful. The news media has a well established history of playing fast and loose with the truth, but at least in the past the public could weigh the lies and distortions from several points of view and try to find a few grains of truth where they crossed. That form of filtering has become much harder over the last couple decades as a number of factors have greatly limited the variety of traditional sources.

Few cities have more than a single major newspaper anymore, and those that remain are generally owned by large media conglomerates. In fact, the ownership of most mass distribution media from magazines to television and radio stations has been concentrated in the hands of an increasingly small group of media moguls. Through design or just as a by-product of their more prosaic commercial motivations, the concentrated ownership of most of the conventional news media has greatly limited the range of perspectives available to the public.

In a paradox of the information age, the mainstream media has traded quantity for quality, providing volumes of trivia and predigested opinion but little substance. Few citizens have the literacy and motivation to do their own research into controversial issues, and so the 30 second sound byte has become the defacto standard of superficial understanding. Politicians and crooks alike have found this situation useful, making it much easier to pass off manipulative emotional appeals and glib spiels that couldn't stand an in depth analysis.

But just when control over the conventional media is becoming increasingly concentrated, and the threshold of entry into traditional media outlets has been raised high enough to eliminate the potential for any new meaningful competition, along comes the Internet to change the rules of the game. It's not surprising that the old guard media resents this increasingly powerful alternative source of information.

What the mudslinging by the conventional media fails to disclose is that the Internet is a multifaceted beast that embraces the full spectrum of human communications from absurd delusions to profound truths. Too often critics of the Internet attempt to discredit its best aspects by holding up examples of its worst content. Just as most newsstands carry a range of publications from the trash tabloids to the allegedly credible name brand papers, so does the Internet.

It's useful to remember that the basic Internet is just a distribution network - a sort of telephone network for computers. And just like the telephone network, it's what people send over the wires that is most interesting, not the underlying cables, computers, and switching gear that transmits the information. The infrastructure provided by the Internet allows a wide variety of information systems to operate over the net, each distributing information in very different ways.

The World Wide Web with its flashy photogenic graphic interface has gotten the lion's share of publicity of late, but by some estimates email in various forms still represents as much as 75% of actual net activity. Most ISP's (Internet service providers) offer their subscribers an email address and mailbox as a standard part of their package. With Internet access and an email address, you can exchange email with anyone else on the net.

Email sent to your address waits in your mailbox on your ISP's computer until you log on and download your mail onto your local computer. The same software is used to write and send outgoing email. At least among the connected community, email has to a substantial extent become the preferred means of communications, largely replacing the handwritten memo, fax, and even some voice phone calls. Email is also one of the preferred means of submitting letters and articles to POC. Email has evolved from simple ASCII text memos to attaching graphics, audio files, and even faxes. There is even software available for under $50 to do machine quality translation of email messages between English, Spanish, French, German and Italian.

While simply exchanging memos one on one is the only use many make of email, the functions offered by most email software open up unexpected potentials. In addition to the basic functions of retrieving and sending messages, most software also provides ways to easily reply to messages or forward them on to other addresses. Of particular interest from the perspective of the Internet as information distribution system is the ability to easily send messages to whole lists of email addresses.

While the established means of accessing information on the net have their uses, a potentially more effective and civilized means of distributing some kinds of information has spontaneously emerged - email forwarding networks. Like coupling the speed and investigative vigor of the small town rumor mill with the exponential distribution curve of chain letters, email forwarding may be the most effective way to distribute information around the globe.

Best of all, informal email networks are by their very nature self regulating and largely eliminate the problem of filtering out much of the dreck and drivel that can be such a problem with the sometimes too generous usenet newsgroups and web search engines. Since forwarding networks are based on friendly cooperation, each node on the network only forwards those messages they find interesting, and discards any messages they wouldn't want to share with the friends on their forwarding list. In the same way, the total volume of messages is limited because each node can only forward as many messages as they have time to read themselves.

My experiences with email forwarding are probably fairly representative of most participants. I started out just echoing interesting messages I received on to a couple friends I thought might also enjoy them. People who have my address know from the mail I've sent them that I enjoy offbeat humor, the peculiarities of human nature, and alternative political information, so when they get a message that fits they send me a copy. Along the way I connected with other people who were already doing the same thing. I added the addresses of people who sent me interesting emails to my outgoing mailing list. I now find I've become one of many links in an indeterminate number of email forwarding networks.

The email software I use makes it just as easy to send a message to a list of addresses as to send it to one person. I have a list of about a dozen email addresses of people who share the same interests, so I echo the messages I receive on to them, most of whom then echo the messages on to their own lists. My list is pretty short because many of the people I know who might be interested are already receiving the messages (before or after me depending the flow direction) through someone else who is already on my list. I pass through from none to a dozen message a day, discarding repeats and inappropriate materials, and sometimes adding my own screeds to the mix.

Most impressive is the potential speed and volume at which forwarded messages can propagate around the world through the net. Consider that if each node in the network echoes a message out to 10 others, the distribution grows an order of magnitude with each echo. I often receive messages with a stack of headers indicating multiple echoes before getting to me. By the time a message has been echoed 6 times, it might have reached a million mailboxes.

Perhaps the best aspect of email networks is that unlike the old game of telephone where the message gets hopelessly garbled as it passes from player to player, in an email network the message is reliably computer duplicated and passes verbatim down the chain. The message will be exactly the same at the end of the chain as at the start. Of course, this doesn't help much if the original message is flawed in either content or format.

The importance of the Internet as an alternative source of information as well as complement and counterbalance to the traditional mass media can only increase as more of the general population joins the connected community. However, the Internet can only fulfill its potentials if it remains free from censorship and restrictions. Free speech does have a cost, but it's far outweighed by the benefits.