Fast . . . faster . . . fastest
It has altered our notions of space and time. Fintan O'Toole on how profoundly the internet has changed us
At the time, to all but an infinitesimally small fraction of humanity, it would have looked like gobbledygook, the result, perhaps, of a toddler banging randomly on a keyboard, or the visual equivalent of a cat walking across an open piano: "http://nxoc01.cern.ch/hypertext/www/TheProject.html".
With its colons and slashes, its jumble of lower and upper cases, of letters and numbers, it would have been as confusing to the eye as it was unintelligible to the brain.
Yet today, well over a billion people, scattered over every continent, could at least recognise this string of text for the kind of creature it is. The http, the www, the colons, slashes and dots are written into the lives of the relatively wealthy part of the world's population.
Even a bizarre coinage like "hypertext", though we may not use it in everyday speech, is a recognisable part of the lexicon. For this was the very first address in the world wide web, created by its visionary founder, Tim Berners-Lee, at the end of 1990.
That date is rather shocking. Berners-Lee's invention has grown so fast - 45 million users in 1995, 420 million in 2000, a billion at the end of 2005, probably two billion in 2010 - and become such an integral part of the way those users live, that it is difficult to imagine that it has been generally available for fewer than 15 years.
The Great Famine seems an awfully long time ago because we have no photographs of it, while the 1850s can seem modern because we have the pictures. The plots of so many movies even from the late 1980s and early 1990s already seem antediluvian because they hinge on people being unable to contact each other - why don't they ring on the mobile?
Equally, the era before the world wide web seems, for those who use it everyday, to be long, long ago. Can it really be only a decade since the supposed guru of information technology, Bill Gates, published a 300-page book on the "information highway" (the phrase itself now charmingly redolent of the distant past) in which the web got just seven passing mentions?
One of the paradoxes of a new technology is that its success can be judged by how quickly it ceases to seem wonderful. In Marcel Proust's great novel sequence, In Search of Lost Time, written in the early years of the 20th century, the narrator recalls his first encounter with an astonishing and disconcerting new technology.
Away from his Paris home, he misses his beloved grandmother. He goes by arrangement to a post office and, after much fuss and a long delay, enters a booth to take a telephone call from her.
Proust captures for us the elusive wonder, the sheer strangeness of the telephone:
"We are like the character in the fairytale at whose wish an enchantress conjures up, in a supernatural light, his grandmother or his betrothed as they turn the pages of a book, shed tears, gather flowers, very close to the spectator yet very far away, in the place where they really are. For this miracle to happen, all we need do is to approach our lips to the magic panel. And as soon as our call has rung out, in the darkness peopled with apparitions to which our ears alone are opened, a shred of sound - an abstract sound - the sound of distance suppressed - and the voice of the dear one speaks to us."
Yet, by the time the book is being written, perhaps 15 years later, the fairytale had lost its magic, and, at least for urban sophisticates in the western world, the telephone had become, as the older Proust puts it "very time consuming and inconvenient". As he reflected, "habit is so quick to demystify the sacred forces with which we are in contact". He was experiencing what would be one of the defining phenomena of that culture we still call modernity: wonders arriving so fast that their novelty wears off in a trice and we learn to take the miraculous for granted.
Most people over 40 can still remember the shock and awe of the first personal computers, for many of us a clunky Amstrad with nothing much going on except a cursor blipping its way across a bright green screen. It had no hard disk - everything had to be saved on floppies. But it was breathtaking.
And then, almost immediately, it was rubbish. No memory? No mouse? No Windows? No facility to waste the day playing Tetris and Solitaire? Pure crap.
And then the next lot were useless because they didn't have modems and couldn't cope with computer games that demanded a vast eight megabytes of RAM. And so on until, a few weeks ago, I found myself becoming enraged on a ferryboat sailing through a deep gorge on the Yangtse River in China because the cliffs kept blocking the satellite signal and I was trying to read The Irish Times online.
THIS VERY IRRITATION, though, is a mark of how profoundly the internet has changed us. It has altered our notions of space and time. The ideas of exile and distance have changed, when you can talk on Skype, listen to your local radio station or read your favourite newspaper from thousands of miles away.
Time passes differently online. The old 33 kilobit modems were dazzlingly fast, then horribly slow. To go now from broadband back to dial-up feels like travelling a long distance by boat and train rather than by aircraft. A 20-second delay while a web page loads is an almost unbearable affront. If a Google search for the word "internet" doesn't come up with 1,990,000,000 answers in 0.17 seconds, there is some fundamental disturbance in the fabric of the universe. Patience has been the first casualty of the internet age.
Social life has changed, as affinity has become vastly easier and avoidance vastly more difficult. Virtual communities have formed - football fans in Singapore, Senegal, Surrey and Sligo can spend hours consoling each other over their favourite striker's metatarsal injury. A well of excuses has dried up: "Bloody post office - I sent you that article days ago" doesn't work anymore.
The hierarchy of knowledge has been undermined. The reclassification of knowledge has heralded previous revolutions in human history: the compilation of the Encyclopaedia by Diderot and d'Alembert was the first act of the French Revolution that ushered in the modern world.
But the web has created its revolution not so much by reordering knowledge as by disordering it. It links everything: the sublime and the ridiculous, the sacred and the profane, the personal and the political. This is a deliberate part of what Berners-Lee called his dream: "the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished".
This challenges one of the basic organising principles of modern societies: expertise. Patients research their diseases online and ply their doctors with more-or-less informed questions. Video bloggers compete with TV news networks and often win. A kid with a camera was subjected to a racial slur by Virginia senator George Allen during the recent US congressional elections, put the video online, handed the Democrats control of the Senate and ended the political career of a man who was supposed to be the next president. Books previously accessible only to scholars are just a few clicks away, as Google puts the Bodleian and other great libraries online.
Newspaper columnists who used to impress readers by hunting out quotes from 10-year-old Dáil debates now find that anyone can do the same in two minutes. Music-lovers override producers and create their own albums by downloading tracks and forming personal playlists.
This exhilarating openness is, at one and the same time, the strength and the weakness of the new virtual culture. The hypertext link that can point to anything is indiscriminate, promiscuous, amoral.
The web allows brave dissidents to keep in touch with each other and the outside world; and terrorists to plan atrocities. It enriches lives by making learning available and debases them by, for example, allowing apparently respectable people to download child pornography. It fuels both great aspirations and dark fantasies. It allows us to connect with the world or to retreat into vile secrecy. It brings us closer to others and takes us further away: tens of millions of people now spend significant parts of their lives in virtual worlds, where they buy, sell, fall in love and have sex without ever having to deal directly with another human being.
At one and the same time, the internet is defining us as consumers, but also turning us into producers. With European 16 to 24-year-olds now spending an average of 13 hours a week online, companies are increasingly seeing the web as the best way to target the young.
Those young people, however, are themselves driving the emergence of what is being labelled as Web 2.0 - the development of platforms that harness the collective intelligence of their users. Ranging from eBay to Google to Wikipedia to Linux to MySpace, these diverse platforms have in common the idea that they are co-created by their users. The current state of the internet could be defined as an unresolved tension between the passivity of consumerism and the dynamism that is built in to the technology.
Yet all of these contradictions point to the ultimate power of this creation: its uncanny ability to mirror humanity. Unlike all previous new technologies, it is not a set of tools outside of ourselves. The web meshes machines and people more completely than any previous technology and its contradictions are ours. It is our unjust societies that maintain the digital divide as a new global class system, our capacity for generosity that created the collectivist not-for-profit ethic of the web, our greed that is making it increasingly subject to corporate takeovers, our desire for connection that drives its curiosity, our damaged minds that generate its dangers. It is, virtually, the way we are.
An illustrated history of the Internet and its impact on Ireland.