The Internet Is Bad For You?

Andrew Keen’s question in his essay, The Internet Is Bad For You, at The Daily Beast, “…wouldn’t it be better to invest that money in local libraries and librarians, where their education could be supervised by accountable human beings?”, brought to mind a few counterpoints on the subject of libraries.

I was informed by a librarian at our local library that even though they have reduced their open hours because of budget cuts, more users are checking out books– and more of them– these last six months, because they have more free time.

I asked what she thought about Keen’s suggestion that Obama’s “goal of providing all Americans with broadband Internet access might one day be seen as inadvertently laying the foundations for a return to fascism”.

She made the point that the library’s publicly available computers are now being used more often by people using computers to do job searches and applying for unemployment benefits than by neo-Nazis looking for white supremacist sites. On the other hand, she said if you want to read Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, it’s there. Or if you want to correspond online with Muslim-hating skinheads, you can.

I also asked her what she thought about the taxpayers’ money being used to subsidize the non-productive time spent by people playing games or viewing pornography on the library’s non-filtered internet. She didn’t remind me that most of those people have been taxpayers themselves, but did say that it’s not the library’s mission to judge what information people access there, as long as it’s legal.

The librarian also told me, in response to my questions about public demand for censorship of certain books, that the Bible is the book most often subject to a request for a ban, and that all the great classics of literature, from the Grapes of Wrath to Montaigne’s Essays, have been the objects of such calls for removal.

Keen asks, “Rather than spending billions of dollars in telecom technology, wouldn’t it be better to invest that money in local libraries and librarians, where their education could be supervised by accountable human beings?”.I assume Keen wouldn’t want that money spent on providing them more computers with broadband access.

I think it would be an excellent idea to invest some of that money Obama wants to spend on our infrastructure in public libraries, but I get the idea from what our librarian told me that she wouldn’t be doing much supervising of the education of those “unemployed, disorientated and angry” Americans Keen’s talking about. Most of them who are already on computers are trying to get a job, entertaining themselves, or blasting profanity-laced tirades at the ‘enemy’ in forums. Anarchy and non-supervision is the model, except for children, of course.

The same governmental laissez faire approach would have to apply to publicly-subsidized broadband Internet access outside the libraries, unless we are a fascist state already. But even now those who are liable to be misled have easier access to all information that might dissuade them than Father Charles Coughlin’s radio listeners ever did, and we know all the information in the world isn’t going to change the mind of a Muslim jihadist.

Yet those books and other information sources, sitting on the shelves or accessed from computers, and paradoxically, our right to hold the gatekeepers accountable for them, are our best protection from the likes of Sarah Palin.

The internet is the great facilitator of making contact, friendly or otherwise, with the teeming millions of our fellow citizens on this planet, It might be worthwhile to aim for making access to it universal, but first things first, We should figure out how to feed, employ, and make medical care accessible to all before we give everybody broadband access. Unfettered free markets failed to magically cause the proliferation of peace, love, and happiness because of human nature.

So will universal broadband access– because of human nature.

If we can attend to those basic human needs, then we won’t have to worry about the individual empowerment of unemployed millions and their susceptibility to the persuasive powers of would-be demagogues, or the organizing potential of the internet.

And “creative chaos” will reign.