Internet Information
(The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly)
Overview
The Internet is an association of thousands of networks and millions of computers across
the world that all work together to share information from distant databases. This is done
by a series of networks and wires that connect to computers through an ISP (Internet
Service Provider).
Approximately 133 million U.S. adults -- 66 percent of the adult population -- have
access to the Internet either at work or home, according to Mediamark. Of those 133
million, 101 million reported using the Internet in the past 30 days. This means that 50
percent of U.S. adults, who total 201.7 million, used the Internet in the past 30 days (as of
April 2001). 1
The number of worldwide Internet users will surpass 665 million by the end of 2002,
according to eTForecasts. The U.S. has the most users followed by Japan, China,
Germany and the United Kingdom.2
NUA http://www.nua.ie/surveys/ reports estimated global online
populations; the vertical axis is millions of people.
The Internet is a source of a vast amount of information and is used around the world.
What are the implications of this information revolution? This paper will discuss "the
good"- positive aspects and possibilities of Internet information. It will also look at "the
bad"- some negative results in our global information flea market. A discussion of some
unintended consequences and philosophical differences about what the Internet is or
should be – "the ugly" will also be included.
The Good
"Yeah man, I tell ya what, man. That dang ol' Internet, man. You just go on
there and point and click. Talk about W-W-dot-W-com. Click. Click. Click.
Click. Click. It's real easy, man".
Boomhauer on King of the Hill television show
If I need an off the wall quote for a paper, click, click, click, and man it’s that easy. I love
the Internet. When your child asks you why the sky is blue and half way through the
explanation, you realize you're about to verge into "…and then God gets out his blue
paintbrush…" viola, the Internet to the rescue, complete with color graphics and light
prism schematics.
Email Me…
The Internet is responsible for the miracle of email. Despite anything else the Internet
may be, email is above all, its killer app.
Activities performed by online households in the US during an average
week, Q2, 2000. (Economist Magazine, October 7, 2000, EEntertainment Survey, page 11.)
Email can keep old friends connected and business associates in convenient connection.
Email is the most used feature of the Internet. It is estimated that 31 billion email
messages are sent daily.3 Email takes seconds to deliver versus days for traditional mail.
This communication where file, photos, text and multimedia can be shared almost
instantly is truly a revolution in communication.
E-Everything
Need to send flowers to a friend in Des Moines, your niece is clamoring for the Survivor
Buff and you don't even know what she is talking about? No problem, click, click flowers.com for your friend and cbs.com for your niece. They will show you bright
pictures of what you're ordering add up the price for you and send your gifts on their
way.
The eSpending report from Goldman Sachs, Nielsen//NetRatings and Harris Interactive
found that November 2002 sales rose 22 percent over last year to $6.2 billion.4
EBay has jumped to the top spot among all online shopping destinations, overtaking
Amazon.com. According to Nielsen//NetRatings, eBay drew a unique audience of 11.9
million shoppers in November, compared with 10.2 million for Amazon. E-Business
continues to grow for consumers and business-business transactions.
From university courses online to Nintendo game tutorials. Virtual classrooms have
become an accepted form of schooling. As the pace of change continues to accelerate,
flexible learning modules have become imperative. Businesses continue to transition to
E-learning formats to keep employees in step with company changes.
According to The Pew Internet & American Life Project. Internet users have
come to rely on the vast amount of research and information content available,
and often consult the Web before making dramatic life changing decisions.
More than 32 million Internet users chose a school or college in the past two years and 36
percent say the Internet was crucial to the selection. Of the 34 million Internet users who
recently started a new hobby, 33 percent said the Internet played an important role.
Additional education or career training was sought by 47 million people, of which 39
percent heavily depended on Internet research. When researching a new car, 27 percent
of the 52 million auto shoppers expressed a crucial dependence on Internet information
with another 22 percent citing minor reliance. The Internet's vast health-related resources
made it easier for the 45 million users who have helped another person deal with a major
illness in the past two years. More than one-quarter (26 percent) indicated that the Web
played an important role; 31 percent say the Web played a minor role. The Internet is
becoming an important information source for a significant portion of the population.5
The real phenomenon of the Internet is that it is the same for everybody (that has access)
with some exceptions discussed later in the paper. There is a sociological "wow" factor to
a system that can connect me, in Ohio, to a Scandinavian fisherman and tell him to look
at a site showing live pictures from Tahiti where we will both be accessing the same
information at the same time. That's good.
The Bad
"Oh, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, 14% of
people know that"
Homer Simpson
The Librarian's Nightmare
According to Dr. Hal Varian, Dean of the School of Information Sciences at the
University of California at Berkeley, in a study called "How Much Information", the
world produced 1.5 billion gigabytes of data in the year 2000. If we divide this amount of
information equally among all humans, each of us would have produced the equivalent of
100 books the size of Tolstoy's War and Peace. To hold all of these books, a train would
need six million boxcars and would stretch around the world more than three times.6 What
do we do with all of this information?
Imagine a library holding massive amounts of information, arranged randomly; an
information maze where authors could choose titles such as; whitehouse.com for a
pornographic site. The library would contain books that were started and never finished,
or books that have a beginning and end, but are missing pages 36-42. Some works of
literary genius are in the library attic, behind rows and rows of "Buy Now, Sex Sells,
Hate the Bengals, Chat about Nothing dot coms". Security Space Web Service estimates
that even though there are almost 20 million Web sites, nearly 90 percent are "orphans"
to which no other sites link.7
In my youth I stressed freedom and in my old age, I stress order. I have
made the great discovery that liberty is a product of order.
Will Durant Time 13 Aug 65
Is Melvil Dewey rolling over in his grave or is this just the mother of all challenges for
the scheming, classifying, cataloging organizers of the modern world. Librarians are
making some order out of the chaos with web sites such as, www.lii.org, a searchable,
annotated subject directory of more than 10,000 Internet resources selected and evaluated
by librarians for their usefulness to users of public libraries. Search engines abound with
various mathematical underpinnings, trying to sort and retrieve our information requests.
Is it possible to get what each individual needs from an unstructured system?
Sir Thomas Gresham was a sixteenth-century financier who studied the impacts of
inflation on currency and then formulated his law: "Bad currency drives out good."8 He
was referring especially to hyperinflation where currency that is constantly losing value is
spent quickly while currency that is holding its value is hoarded, hence, the bad currency
driving out the good. If Gresham's law is applied to information, then we are left with the
idea that the plethora of information actually causes "good" information to be lost or
hoarded while "bad" information is propagated and spread.
Misinformation Mecca
"Coercion, after all, merely captures man. Freedom captivates him".
Robert McNamara, US Sect. Of Defense, NYTimes, 19 May 66
The Internet is a powerful forum for free expression. Free doesn't necessarily translate to
truthful. Some sites are spoofs and could be viewed as harmless, but as the following
example illustrates, there may be enough truth to fool readers. When I first saw the
following hoax in the form of an email, I believed that the assessment had been done in
earnest.
Among US presidents who have run the country over the last 50 years,
George W. Bush appears to have the lowest Intelligence Quotient (IQ). His IQ
has proved lower than that of the average American citizen. According to the
British press, the finding has been obtained by researchers from the State of
Pennsylvania.
In a report published Monday, the Lovenstein Institute of Scranton,
Pennsylvania detailed its findings of a four month study of the intelligence
quotient of President George W. Bush.
According to statements in the report, there have been twelve presidents over
the past 50 years, from F. D. Roosevelt to G. W. Bush who were all rated
based on scholarly achievements, writings that they alone produced without
aid of staff, their ability to speak with clarity, and several other psychological
factors which were then scored in the Swanson/Crain system of intelligence
ranking.
Internet hoax- http://www.linkydinky.com/BushIQ.shtml
Even Garry Trudeau admitted to being duped by this Internet hoax. Trudeau, who cited
the faux IQ study in a recent comic strip, apologized for "unsettling anyone who was
under the impression that the President is, in fact, quite intelligent."
Other Internet sites may be more malicious in intent. They are not meant as satire or
humor, but are specifically designed to misinform. They often mimic factual sites in
design and title or address. The martinlutherking.org site is a white supremist site
masquerading as a scholarly site for historical information on Martin Luther King.
"The home page depicts a photograph of King and includes links titled “Historical
Writings,” “The Death of a Dream,” and “Recommended Books,” among others. It also
links to a pictorial review of the Civil Rights period. The two top page clues lie in the email link to vincent.breeding@stormfront.org (a white power organization) and the
Web design by Candidus Productions link. The Candidus Productions home page is
decorated by white power symbols and claims to provide various Web applications for
pro-White people.” 9
Creating our own mental filter of what we believe or not is one of the difficulties arising
from free flowing information. Another problem is that information flows from those
who have access to those who also have access. There has been much discussion about
the possibility of a "digital divide", a new addition to war of "haves" vs. "have-nots".
Six-figure households make up the fastest growth group on the Web, according to a
survey by Web research firm Nielsen//NetRatings. The survey found that individuals with
household incomes ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 are the fastest growing income
group online, which represents nearly 15 million Web surfers. Individuals in households
bringing home less than $25,000 a year eked out about 2 percent growth in representation
online, Nielsen//NetRatings said. Families in the $25,000 to $50,000 income range grew
by 5 percent.10
One interesting implication in this statistic is that we might be misinforming the rich
more than the poor! However, those that have the greatest access, also have the greatest
access to education, non-internet literature and scholarly research that will permit them to
develop the mental filters and search techniques needed to navigate the Internet.
Deceit
The Internet in all its glory promises us the world and for only $9.99 the secret of world
domination can be yours.
Email is the most used feature of the Internet. It is estimated that 31 billion email
messages are sent daily.11 The use of email is now accompanied by the ritual of deleting
most of the email before it is ever opened. The obnoxious, uninvited mail is called spam
and one in nine email messages in the U.S. in 2002 contained spam.12
Those of us telecommuting through our computer may also have experienced perplexing
emails from our IT specialists, telling us that we shouldn't have opened the email and
attachment, because anyone could have sent the email with a virus attached and made it
look as if it had come from the IT department's computer. Huh?
Email had seemed like such a beautiful thing- no hunting for paper, stamps and
envelopes. Now, I, as well as most others have multiple email accounts to try to avoid
spam on our "good" account, multiple folders for sorting the mail, various screens to try
to weed out spam and a constant nagging fear of opening a computer-crashing mutant
email.
Internet email fraud takes the form of Nigerian money offers (help transfer money out of
the country), bogus credit card offers, congratulations you won… come ons, and so on.
The National Consumers League estimates the total loss from Internet fraud from January
to June 2002 at $ 7,209,906, with an average individual loss of $484.13
Sabotage
Computer viruses, worms, Trojan horses and hoaxes cause immense worry and cost to
Internet users. There were over 7000 new viruses discovered this year.14 According to
data from Consumer Economics, the total global cost of viruses in 2000 was $ 17.1
billion.15
Applications are often linked with a Web-services package that consists of a standardized
interface that allows applications, databases, and other programs to share information
with each other over the Internet. We value this interoperability in our interactions with
others, unless those others happen to be hackers.
It is an inherent Internet irony that its openness and connectivity is what makes it so
useful and so dangerous.
The Ugly
Guest: He killed the bride's father!!
King: No, please! This is supposed to be a 'appy occasion!
Let's not bicker and argue about 'oo killed 'oo ...
"Monty Python and the Holy Grail"
Fee or Free
Information is power. We all know what we would like the Internet to be, or we think we
do, but what are the ramifications of free information flow or the attempts to stem this
flow? There are possibilities that we have not even considered and always the law of
unintended consequences.
It began as a Taoist project aimed at finding the secret to immortality. Which
is how the Chinese came up with an odd mixture of saltpeter (potassium
nitrate), sulfur, and charcoal or dry honey. But it turned out to have a bit of a
bang.16 So from the search for immortality we got the deadly potential of
gunpowder.
Many of us experienced the euphoria of Napster. A music lover could discover songs
they hadn't heard since they were ten. There was the nagging guilt- is this cheating, is this
wrong, and the thrill that maybe this was a glitch in time, a brief moment of free
information. Napster is gone but the debate goes on. Is this information anarchy the death
of capitalism? It certainly has the power to create strange situations. My teenage son was
busy at his computer, while mp3's played accompanying music; I listened as I overheard
Mozart, Rammstein (a German, power-techno band) and Japanese anime music played in
succession. I don't know what this will do to his brain-wave patterns, but I do know that it
is a phenomenon due to the Internet.
There are ongoing debates about reshaping copyright laws. Media companies want to
stop bootlegged media flowing across the Internet. Many have been lobbying for new
laws. There is also a movement to build copy-protection mechanisms into personal
computers and digital recording devices. These devices could severely limit a consumers
ability to copy their own files or have unlimited private use of legally purchased media
content as the current copyright law provides.
An unintended consequence of developing new restrictive technology is that it could slow
the evolution of technology as consumers hesitate to move to unappealing next
generation technology.17
This isn't an easy issue, but it is an issue with traditional economic laws at its core. There
are both short term and long term effects from free information. Perhaps being able to
sample music will just wet my teen-age son's appetite for buying music. In fact, his early
exposure to so many genres of music clearly influenced him to form a rock band and
spend a small fortune on equipment. Time, actions and reactions in global world move so
fast, it will take very clever legislation to provide a solution without creating even more
problems.
Filtered Freedom
There is beauty to the idea of freely sharing ideas. The Chinese government may not see
the art in this abstract virtual world. The Chinese government regularly denies access to
over 19,000 web sites that are deemed threatening. It is a filter of information. Is this the
type of filtering that will enhance the Internet? Actions such as this make us clamor for
the unorganized, unrestrained information flow that we have just criticized.
The Internet has been viewed as the ultimate conduit for free expression, but maybe it is a
temporary illusion. There is evidence that the Internet may be easier to control than older
forms of communication such as, telephones, faxes or letters. The Internet relies on
central routing points. The Chinese government has been able to block information going
to or from these points. Even traditional letters could only be monitored one at a time
with many slipping through without screening. The Chinese government cites the
proliferation of pornography as a main reason for censorship; however, a Harvard study
found that during a six-month period only 15 % of the pornography sites were blocked.
However, the vigilant government was able to block notorious pornographic sites such as,
National Public Radio (think: Garrison Keilor), The Los Angeles Times, The Washington
Post and Time magazine.18
A recent study out of Ohio State University also points out the vulnerabilities of an
Internet composed of central nodes. Simulation models displayed that a catastrophic
event was possible if critical Internet nodes were successfully attacked.19
AOL has recently announced plans to begin a major shift toward add-on services to sell
to its members. This may indicate a shift from free Internet sites supported by advertising
revenue to a pay as you go Internet. As Internet providers become fewer, the information
that they choose to provide may become limited. It may very well become the capitalist
version of the Chinese government filtering.
Summary
"As long as men are free to ask what they must; free to say what they think;
free to think what they will; freedom can never be lost and science can never
regress."
-- J. Robert Oppenheimer
I hesitated before I selected the above quote, after all, Oppenheimer's name is
synonymous with the atomic bomb, is he the right man to quote on the importance of
freedom? But Oppenheimer's name will also always be associated with the dilemma
between producing revolutionary science and producing science that could destroy the
world. This inherent paradox between the necessity of freedom and the possible perils of
using that freedom seems to sum up the Internet debate.
The Internet is part of an information revolution - a revolution, a sudden change, where
we are all affected in one way or another. Information that we want, just a few keystrokes
away or our confidential information given away by strangers we never knew. We are all
a part of the information revolution.
The Internet itself, however, is nothing more than a tool in this revolution. It is a conduit
of information, vaguely different from a canal for transporting goods. As we sail through
this canal at the speed of light, we can catch glimpses of mankind, the good, the bad and
the ugly. Whether we stop to learn more or whether we form opinions based on nothing
more than a fleeting factoid has nothing to do with the Internet itself or what is contained
therein, but on ourselves. We'll only gain pieces of information if we stand in the boat
and watch the world go by. We'll eventually have to decide at which points we want to
get out and gain real knowledge. The Internet promises the possibility of opening up the
world to us and getting us to those points.
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