Can the Internet replace traditional media?
TECHNOLOGY AND ELECTRONIC innovation, which we in the modern world accept as proof of progress, challenges the cultural worldview of our present and past, leapfrogging, into the distant corners of the Third World. This inexhorable reality is largely ignored in the hype with which governments and businesses embrace this new technology, without understanding its limits or dangers.
Into this unresolved debate, intrudes the Internet's promise of a new electronic and technological innovation. This new medium is caught in globalization's perceived reach, and comes with promises it cannot fulfill. Too much is expected of it than as a tool to ease how we work and play. This worsens with the speed of innovations, with computing power doubling at half the cost every year or so. What makes this debate so dangerous is this superficial insistence that speed resolves everything.
A long way to go
Rational voices disappear in this hyped, largely one-sided debate
on what it represents. The Internet, despite the hype, is still an
elitist means of communication, available to those with money to sustain
it. We do not need it, unless our work or interest or purse or
inclination or a combintion of them require it. But the dominant
worldview of business and government in every country in Asia and the
world raises the relevance of the Internet into wishful thinking. It
has, of course, a role. It is a useful tool for many, but not all.
Hundreds of millions of people around the world, at all walks of
society, could sail through life without knowing what the Internet is.
But this projection of the Internet and other toys of the technological and
electronic revolution as the cutting edge of communications overawes the
man-in-the-street. He is dazzled by technological innovation when it
first makes its appearance, but does not understand it. People who
freeze in front of a computer come from all walks of life, the same fear
some people face when driving a motor car or adjusting the television
screen. A "breeding ground" for alternate views
But what saves the Internet from being written off is people's
perception that if people believe instinctly, rightly or wrongly, any
news from that medium. The Malaysian government's biggest hurdle in the
internal political division, rarely surfacing because of its tight
control of the official media, is to respond to the huge mass of
contraditory opinions and attacks on it. If it does not, it has lost
ground; if it does, it cannot catch up. The British government had a
taste of that during the Second World War, when its people believed the
brilliant psychological warfare broadcasts by an Englishman turned German sympathiser, William
Joyce (as Lord Haw Haw) about Britain's impending doom in the war
against Hitler. Joyce was arrested and, after the War, sentenced to
death and hanged for treason. But while the broadcasts lasted, it could
be deflected with much effort. And so of television coverage of the
Vietnam War. The Internet's importance in this perception of the world
is as important today as the radio and the television was at their
prime.
But unlike the radio and television, the Internet is unstructured
and amorphous. It can be fashioned to work in particular circumstances
of purpose, but it cannot have the world wide dissemminatory powers the
newspapers, radio and television has. It is believable because the
recipient instinctly accepts the truth, rightly or wrongly, if the
message comes from the Internet. This is not the result of progressive
technology, but as an instinctive reaction to contraptions beyond his
comprehension. He is led to believe in the usefulness of modern
technology, and he would not be seen to decry it. And so he would
believe, until he is proven otherwise. That is easier said than done.
The Internet's short life -- the speed with which it moves ahead; the
Internet I hooked on to in 1996 is outdated compared to the more
modest setup I have to run my Sang Kancil mailing list on Malaysian
affairs -- makes it difficult to imprint the importance of this medium
in the minds of people who are conditioned to accept the latest
technology. It's not just e-mail you know
My greater worry about the insidiousness (and I use this word
advisedly) is that the Internet is a manipulative medium. It can be
fashioned to whatever the manipulator wants it to represent to the world
at large. This would make the Internet putty to these dictators of the
mind. But this also means that unlike with radio, television and the
newspapers, others can manipulate it to provide an alternate view.
For the government, especially those with an authoritarian bent of mind
like in Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, Myanmar, the dissent comes
through a medium it does not control, and its equanimity is maintained
only if it goes on the offensive. Apart from the Singapore government,
which contains this dissent, or tries to, none of the others could or have.
The Malaysian government, despite its commitment to the information highway,
stumbles at the starting block while its critics stream ahead to the goal post.
Today, there is more to the Internet than sending emails and taking
part in discussion groups. It is now the alleged medium that would set
the world on fire, with news variations like Intranet concentrating on
what in this hyperbolic atmosphere goes under the catchwords of
e-commerce in a K-society. It does not matter if you do not know what
they mean and what they can do. But these systems are integrated into a
world which for a millennia have done things the way they always did,
making incremental changes not overnight, as the Internet and other
technological advances have us do, but gradually. The confusion in the
mobile phone market -- now that is a welcome development, even if I use
it mainly to call people than have them call me! -- with the public
seduced into smaller and more powerful phones at half the arm and leg
you paid for an earlier model, ignores the intrinsic improvement, such
as it is, in our lives. But the Internet still far from the ground
So, ultimately, the question of the Internet's role in every day
life depends on its utility. If people find it useful, they will
integrate it into their lives. What holds it back -- and this is so of
every electronic contraption since sliced bread -- is the high cost of
hooking on to it. Most of us are suckers for progress, and jump to
every incremental model of what we have. We forget to investigate the
usefulness of these contraptions, and use it for the work at hand. In
this I am a dodo. My computer system, which I had a friend assemble,
uses an Intel chip called the MMX-200, an earlier Pentium model, but
because I know what I want it for, I am impervious to how "old fashioned"
it is. But it more than serves my purpose, and I am upgrading the UNIX
operating system on it. If I had taken the MS-Windows route, I could
not even install its latest operating system, let alone use it.
There is too much emphasis on the technological advances of the Internet, as a marketing campaign, for its use to be used fully. Which is why it is immensely expensive for the man-in-the-street to embrace the Internet as he did the earlier instruments of communication. Its acceptance is in its perceived modernity, not in its use. This means that its continued placement in the public consciousness is dependent on the marketing campaigns to ensure its relevance. This brings out the anarchic boundaries in which it exists. The Internet therefore becomes a symbol of technological advance than a useful tool of practical use, like the radio, the television, the newspaper. Its relevance in the future depends on how well a purveyor of information it is than its use by the user. This is why I do not believe it would or could replace the existing print and other media. Even if it challenges the existing orthodoxy -- in business, politics and every endeavour of human behaviour.