First the porn, then the culture

By Emma Tom | The Australian | Saturday, July 10, 2010

CHICKEN Little responses to the online revolution have a familiar, if not hollow, ring.

OPPONENTS of Australia's proposed super-fast broadband must be spitting silicon chips over the latest news from Finland.

The home of sauteed reindeer and more than 40 different words for snow has just made broadband a legal right. Thus the right to vote, the right to equality before the law and the right to party like it's yhdeksantoista yhdeksankymmenta yhdeksikko (1999) are now joined by the right to access dodgy online translators.

According to senior Scandinavian correspondents, the world-first legislation won't even mean much of a change. About 96 per cent of Finns are already online, leaving only about 4000 homes that still need connecting to comply with the law.

Perhaps the Finnish powers-that-be will form special police squads to raid houses suspected of being illicitly Luddite. Fines could then be issued to anyone found harbouring a 1978 Exidy Sorcerer computer or one of those phones that still require the insertion of fingers into holes.

The digital penetration situation is very different here, where less than half of us are wired. This situation will obviously change dramatically if the national broadband network unrolls as planned over the next eight years. If Labor is re-elected, the bulk of us will get access to fat pipes permitting download speeds of 100 megabits per second.

These are the sort of speeds that will clear up the snail trails of pixelations so often a feature of contemporary attempts to conduct Jetsons-style video conferences, and are billed as bringing in a brave new world of e-health, e-governance and so on.

Technodemics and alpha geeks must find all this pimple-explodingly exciting. (Note: it's OK to make jokes about nerds, now that they rule the world.)

Other citizens, however, remain sceptical. They want to know whether the NBN will really deliver on buzz words such as participation, innovation, networking and global village citizenship, or whether it'll just mean better quality porn.

The big problem with working out what life will look like once we're swept away in the speedy broadband rip tide is that it's impossible to know. Divining the future is one of the few things the internet can't do, so the void is being filled with human speculation.

Some comes from Chicken Littles predicting a techno-dystopia only slightly less scourgey than the machine-controlled world of the Terminator movies. They're responsible for the Internet Ate My Brain thesis, which claims that cyberspace is cutting our concentration spans and shrinking (or at least irrevocably altering) that um top bit what we thunk with.

In his 2008 essay Is Google Making Us Stupid?, Nicholas G. Carr argues that new technology can rewire the brain's neural circuitry. He refers to the change in German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche's prose style when he started using a typewriter. "It is revealing, and distressing," Carr says, "to compare the cognitive effects of the internet with those of an earlier information technology, the printed book."

Carr seems to be saying there was a golden artistic age where there was just the right amount of technology -- post-pen but obviously pre-iStuff. If our brains hadn't already been eaten away by the evil incursion of the telegraph, we would have recognised this point and put a stop to new inventions once and for all.

In reality, fear and loathing have accompanied most big technological changes, suggesting these responses have more to do with human panic at altered social circumstance rather than the gadgetry itself.

It's worth remembering that our resilience -- not to mention our never-ending quest for novelty -- means the new-fangled very quickly becomes the commonplace and then the obsolete. Recordings of the bleeps and shrieks of old-school dial-up internet connections are now on sale in MP3 form as retro curiosities.

Another aspect of the pessimistic position is the assumption the internet will replace books rather than be an adjunct to them. People such as me, however, manage to read gigaloads of digitised text as well as the old-fashioned type printed on dead trees.

In fact I suspect much of the outrage over the alleged demise of reading is actually outrage over a rise in the sort of reading of which the elite does not approve.

American writer Clay Shirky's optimistic riposte to the prophets of doom is that the internet establishes reading and writing as central activities in our culture.

He also points out that, as with the publishing revolution associated with the printing press, the highbrow tends to follow the low.

"In the history of print, we got erotic novels 100 years before we got scientific journals," he writes. "No less a beneficiary of the printing press than Martin Luther complained: 'The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure of limit to this fever for writing.' "

Another feverish -- and fascinating -- writer in this area is Queensland academic John Hartley. In his 2009 book, The Uses of Digital Literacy, he notes the cataclysmic predictions of a descent into debased populism that have "greeted every extension of education, employment and consumer choice" throughout the modern era.

Hartley's argument is that the progression from read-only literacy to read-write uses of multimedia means writing is finally catching up with reading.

In an upcoming work, he also raises the notion of "silly citizenship", which contends that the mischief-making so prevalent on the internet is far more than frivolous distraction.

"In mainstream media the rise of 'satire TV', notably The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, has propelled comedy, send-ups and spoofs to the centre of the political process," Hartley writes.

"Comedy is becoming a more trusted source of political information than partisan commentators in mainstream news."

In this way, he says, the role of wise counsellor is defaulting to the fool as it has in Western drama from Aristophanes to Shakespeare: "Comedy is the go-to source for civic understanding."

Such views on democratic engagement certainly support the Finnish approach as well as suggesting that those on the wrong side of the digital divide are genuinely disenfranchised rather than merely inconvenienced.

The best plan of attack, therefore, is to stop catastrophising and start strategising.

An excellent starting point would be Hartley's plea that citizens receive a better education in the production as well as the consumption of digital content so we can take more active roles in this new cyber town square.

The future may be unknowable -- but it is also written.

info@emmatom.com.au