Is the Internet an amazing force for good? Or is it more problematic than people realise? Over the past year or so there’s been a trend in the mainstream press for articles which claimed the latter. For a while this took the form of pieces which asked the question: “Is Google making us stupid?”, the absurd premise of which could only fully be appreciated if you’d used Google itself to find the article, in which case you had to concede that yes, on this occasion it had made you stupid.
Another prevalent form of Internet-bashing has been to take all the things which web-sceptics like to moan about – google, twitter, free stuff, those cocky bloggers etc – and somehow crush them together until you come up with an overarching set of characteristics that proves your theory that the Internet is inherently bad – or at least not as great as those naive, over-eager youngsters keep claiming.
A classic example of this appeared in the Sunday Times last week as a piece by Bryan Appleyard titled “Break free of this world wide delusion” which perfectly highlights the problems with this trend of mainstream-journalists-casting doubt-on-the-Internet. Appleyard’s thesis, in so far as one exists, is that the idea of the web as a revolutionary tool is wrong and dangerous. As proof of this, he takes the reader on an eclectic journey of the usual bugbears of net-bashers. Take, for example, his view on blogging:
