Coming soon to a screen near you.....
I'm a Webaholic. In my first month of surfing the Web, I accessed over 3000 pages. AOL loved me. I was mesmerized. Occasionally I would eat. Drinking was a distraction.Cigarets sustained me through the long days and nights. The thought of being away from my screen induced mild panic. They call it CyberPsychosis.It's one of those things that you can run from, but ultimately can't escape. Call it The Net, The Web, The Infobahn, The Information Superhighway, it's here - and it isn't going away.
What's astonishing about the Web is its rapid rise to ubiquity. A couple of years ago, Al Gore was babbling about the Information Superhighway, and we were looking at him thinking we weren't going to have much to do with it. We were wrong. It seems that the world and his/her spouse has a homepage today. Designers now call themselves "Website Engineers". Writers have become "Website Text Facilitators". There's a frenetic rush among businesses large and small to establish a presence on the Web. There's an almost palpable Gold Rush Fever - "If we don't get on a site now, we'll be left behind!"
In Britain, by all accounts, WebMania is rampant. When I was there a couple of months ago, no-one was interested. No-one had heard of the damned thing!
So what's it all about? Just a hype, or is this really something new? Is it going to sap the moral fibre of the nation by force-feeding pornography to10 year-olds? Will the Web remain the domain of geeks with pocket protectors and anoraks? Or is this medium truly something revolutionary, whose effects on our lives are simply too vast to contemplate as yet?
So what is it? How come a collection of electronic blips with no physical "reality" as we understand it can so completely seize the collective imagination? And what's it got to do with ME?
I have no answers. But I believe the attraction of the Web is that it is the only "thing" we have created which mimics the brain. Like the human mind, the Web has no limits or borders, it knows no time. It grows organically and exponentially. It is, in a very real sense, the "Last Frontier". There are no rules in CyberSpace - although our legislators would dearly love to introduce some. It is a medium which, currently, is completely democratic. As such, it represents a grave threat to the status quo. And it is inevitable that the powers that be will attempt to control access to and the content of the Web.
As such, the notion of the Web, its capability, its anarchy, is going to influence every aspect of our lives. It is already calling into question some basic legal concepts, such as "copyright". (Where do you think I got the phoenix logo on the front page?) How can you "own" an image which doesn't exist (in the conventional sense), is publicly accessible and can be manipulated with a few simple key strokes?
Apart from a whole raft of legal and ethical questions, perhaps the most significant feature of the Web is, I believe, how it will influence our lifestyles (everyone has one of those, don't they?); how, combined with the changing nature of work, it will give rise to new forms of social interaction, and beneficial spin-offs in environmental and quality of life issues.
At the moment, anyone with a minimal amount of hardware can access the Web. The number of "Free Homepage" sites is proliferating. And, quite frankly, anyone with an iota of common sense can cobble together a reasonably presentable page. The content is irrelevant. MacLuhan was talking of a different medium, but in this case, the medium truly is the message. What you say on the Web is less important than the fact that you're saying it. The capabilities of this new medium are so little understood that the desire to see your name on the screen makes what you have to say of little importance, and at the same time of major significance.
Had he lived to see this revolution in communications media, Andy Warhol would have been enamored of it. We can all have our 15 milliseconds of fame.
We have entered the era of post-mass-communication. The networks are dead - long live the Net! If the business of communicating with masses of people via TV is not quite over, 500 channels, fiberoptics and the ubiquitous screen in every room will hasten its demise before the new millennium.
But what's it going to do to us? I don't honestly believe we will turn into a species with square eyes, low social skills, an expanded brain and atrophied limbs. The Web will open us up to new, different and, I believe, better forms of social interaction, developed away from the distractions of race and gender.