Over the past ten days I took part in three different cultural events. One had to do with the problems of information and the other two on other matters. But there were questions and heated discussions in all three about the Internet. There again, the same would probably have happened if I’d been involved in a conference on Homer, and if you don’t believe me, go to a good search engine and see how much you find, good and bad, about Homer on the Web. Any conference on Homer now needs to express judgments on the reliability of sites dedicated to the poet; otherwise, students and academics will no longer know what they can trust.
I’ll list just a few of the points in the discussions. When one delegate praised the Internet as the achievement of total democracy in terms of information, another objected that a young person today could stumble across hundreds of racist sites and download Mein Kampf or The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Reply: if you leave this building and visit the occult bookshop down the road, you’ll come across a copy of the Protocols right away. Counter-reply: yes, but you have to want to look for it, whereas on the Web you’ll find it even when you’re looking for something else. Counter-counter-reply: but at the same time you’ll come across a vast number of antiracist sites, therefore Web democracy self-compensates.
Final response: Hitler published and distributed Mein Kampf before the Internet, and perhaps that was lucky for him. With the Internet there could never be another Auschwitz, since everyone would find out about it right away, and no one could say they didn’t know.
In support of this final comment, I heard a Chinese sociologist a few days later speak about what was happening with the Internet in China. Users cannot get direct access to the Web, but have to pass through state centers that screen information. So there seems to be censorship. Yet it appears that censorship of the Internet is impossible. First example: it’s true that state filters allow you, let us say, to access site A but not site B, yet every good navigator knows that, having reached A, in some way or other you can get from A to B. Then there’s email: once you allow this, people begin to circulate news. Lastly there are chat rooms. In the West, it seems, they are visited mostly by people who have nothing better to do and nothing to say, but in China it’s different: people discuss politics there, which they couldn’t do elsewhere.
But the state’s impotence in relation to the network goes further. Network bureaucrats don’t know what to block. Some time ago, it seems the New York Times telephoned to protest that its site was being screened, but that of the Washington Post was not. The bureaucrats said they’d check it out, and the next day they responded by saying not to worry, they’d taken steps to block the Washington Post as well. But these are anecdotes. The fact is that, for example, if I remember correctly, you can’t access the CBS site, but you can reach ABC. I asked a Chinese friend why. There are no good reasons, he replied; bureaucrats have to show they’re doing something, and they strike more or less at random. Conclusion: in the battle between the Chinese government and the Internet, the government is bound to lose.
Every so often, some good news.
2000