<fwd> Prejudice on the Internet: freedom and a whiff of danger

[Vin McLellan]

        Replayed (w/out permission) from Netfuture #4, the 1/15 issue of a
new and unusually thoughtful mailing list Digest from O'Reilly &
Associates. Moderator and editor: Stephen L. Talbot.  Check it out at:
<http://www.ora.com/staff/stevet/netfuture/>  The signal/noise ratio is
delightful, and there were several mini-essays that many here might enjoy
and might wish to respond to.  Recommended by one stimulated reader.
                                _Vin
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    Response to "The Internet As Terminator" (Netfuture-3)

>From Mark Grundy <Mark.Grundy at cisr.anu.edu.au>

Give us inkblots on a page, and we'll read into them creatures of our
fantasy.  In the shapes of clouds we see the images of our lives, our
dreams, and our hopes and fears.  We've always made myths out of our
jumbled and incomplete experiences.  We've done it with weather, we've
learned to do it with newspapers and tv bites, and we're starting to do
it with the internet.

We judge our world before we experience it.  Our judgement is creative.
It fills in the gaps where our knowledge fails.  It focuses our efforts,
clarifying our visions, identifying our opportunities and threats.
Prejudice -- to judge before experiencing -- is not limited to just one
culture, and it's not a blight on humanity as a species.  Every mammal
has prejudice as part of its survival training.  The trick to mastering
our prejudice is not to purge it and cripple our efficacy, but to accept
its value in the moment, and to rise to the need to change it as
imagination yields to experience.

The main difference between the internet and other social experiences is
not its diversity or complexity, because we can find diversity and
complexity in every community.  What distinguishes the internet most from
other social experiences is how well we can control the experience itself.
We can walk down a crowded city street and see plenty to challenge us, but
we cannot control the bandwidth of that street.  We cannot choose to
encounter people wearing only yellow shirts, or remove anyone from the
street who wears a green shirt.  Yet these facilities come free on the
internet.  Our right to censor our environment no longer wars with our
desire for society and community.  We can have our cake and eat it too.

This heady power -- to give ourselves just the world we want to see,
appeals very strongly to our self-determination.  Ideally, it could help
us make great leaps between who we think we are, and who we believe we
could be.  It can surround us with saints, and screen us from sinners.
But it brings with it some whiff of danger.  If all we see of the
internet is the community we've created for ourselves, then will the
internet make us more or less parochial in our views?  Will our society
become more or less divisive?  Will we see more or less conflict in our
community?

Moreover, the internet is not just a passive world of data sops, as
television has been.  Through the internet, we can not only dream our
lotus dreams, but also act on them remotely, screening ourselves from
direct consequence by distance and anonymity, taking action while
preserving our little myths.

It's not just that we can engage in infantile flamefests with people
we've never met, cackling over our own supposed cleverness, and ignorant
of whatever harm we might have done their feelings.  Sitting in our comfy
chairs at home and armed with a mouse and credit card, we could contribute
money and ideas to the liberation of political prisoners in Turkey, or to
the bombing of a  bank in London -- all without changing our current,
perhaps quite sedentary, lifestyles.  We can wreak change on the world
without being changed by our acts ourselves.

What I would like to ask this group is twofold:  Firstly as we're forced
by the growing volume of internet traffic to make balder value judgements
on what we expose ourselves to, how do we keep from becoming social
ostriches?  How do we balance tolerance against efficiency and purpose?

Secondly, how can we make ourselves accountable for the material
consequences of our broadcasts?  What support, infrastructure and
personal code is necessary before our global internet citizenship becomes
at least as responsible as our national citizenships?  On a cheerier
note, can anyone think of ways that internet citizenship is already more
responsible than national citizenship?

Dr Mark Grundy,                        | Phone:       +61-6-249 0159
Education Co-ordinator,                | Fax:         +61-6-249 0747
CRC for Advanced Computational Systems,| Web: http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Mark.Grundy
The Australian National University,    | ACSys:
0200 Australia

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    Vin McLellan +The Privacy Guild+ <vin at shore.net>
 53 Nichols St., Chelsea, Ma. 02150 USA Tel: (617) 884-5548
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