The Internet: World Wide Wilderness?
**Once upon a time, some particle physicists needed to access their data from anywhere in the world without resorting to memorising haughty strings of numbers. Now, Fleet Street’s output seems positively antiquated, the Arab world is steamrolling towards democracy and the high street is waning. Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau changed everything.**
With news sites multiplying and Twitter’s “trending topics” representing an avant-garde of news, the printed press need to reinvent themselves constantly in order to remain relevant and television no longer brings you breaking news first.
{{ quote Whether social media instigated the uprisings or was simply a tool to unite the rebels, its place as a weapon of civil liberties has been firmly rooted }}
2011’s biggest news story, the Arab Spring, is ongoing. Analysts galore have queried what triggered such a mass uprising, with consensus pointing towards malcontent youth being united by social media. Whether social media instigated the uprisings or was simply a tool to unite the rebels, its place as a weapon of civil liberties has been firmly rooted. With four overthrown governments and two civil wars, as well as major protests and governmental changes elsewhere — all of which have seen the utilisation of social media for freedom of expression and mass organisation — it seems the World Wide Web has granted power to the people in an unmitigated way.
Concurrent protests in Spain and Greece have had largely economics causes, but therein lies another realm in which the internet’s influence is staggering. After telephone sales exacerbated Black Monday, NASD introduced automated systems. This paved the way for the “dot-com bubble” of 1999-2000, when investors invested heavily in stocks, most of which holding the most tenuous links to the web. The subsequent bust saw some companies fail after 98% losses.
Furthermore, online brokers can cut overheads and thus lower end-user dealing costs: a portfolio of value less than £5000 is feasible today, whereas it would have been absurd just twenty years ago.
Virtual stores have become genuine market leaders in every industry; high street retailers now struggle against online competitors. The fall of Woolworths is often attributed to an inability to compete with online merchants and HMV has entered administration after years of iTunes, Amazon and Netflix cornering or eradicating their respective markets.
Somehow, Waterstones manages to weather all storms by changing hands and diffusing that new book smell, but ebooks are nonetheless knocking on the door of paperback sales.
This isn’t all bad, however: for independent authors, the rise of ebooks is fantastic. Never before has the written word had such ability to reach a large market without publishers. The music industry has had a similar turnaround for independent artists, with Soundcloud, and YouTube capable of allowing unsigned artists to reach a hitherto distant audience, even if peer-to-peer sharing has damaged physical sales in the industry at large.
So with governments, economies and the media tending towards an online free-for-all, what will the e-topia look like? Skynet may be an impossibility, but only 22 years into the reign of WWW, we remain far from realising the endgame of such a terrifyingly potent technology.
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