Will The Web We Wove Protect Us From Evil?

The Internet, which began as a U.S. military construct for global communications, quickly became the international communications utility. Today, it is the globe-eating spiderweb of consumerism, expression (free and otherwise), love, hate, politics, and religion. Perhaps it will be a protector of free expression and defense against closed, authoritarian governments and oligarchies. Or it will be another force for censorship and control.

At the end of the '90s, the New York Times writer, Thomas Friedman predicted in The Lexus And The Olive Tree that "...two great democratizing forces — global communications and global finance — will sweep away any regime which is not open, transparent and democratic." Global finance surely has not. Global communication in the rapidly expanding and evolving Internet is the great hope. Like many of man's inventions that promise to raise our freedom and equality, the promise may not be fulfilled. Forces are even now gathering like Ghost Busters' demons over a Manhattan condo to use the 'Net to control and censor. We are at a crossroads and the future is unclear.

We now have a global network of inter-connected servers that create a spiderweb (the Quechua word of Peruvian/Bolivian Indians for the 'Net) of access in which the world has now become dependent. It has, in much of the world, become part of our lives, totally necessary for the economies, governments, businesses, and banking systems that connect our world. It is a fragile web (when will the terrorists target the linked servers and what Google calls "server farms"?) but we believed it to be the means to democratize and free the world. How, after all, could the dictators not fall and societies not become open and free with information and communication so easily accessible?

The Lumeta Corporation has been involved in the mapping of the virtual web that is the Web. The image included with this piece is a detail of one of the maps of the Internet Mapping Project of Lumeta.

The Global Policy Forum, a group whose stated mission is "to monitor policy making at the United Nations, promote accountability of global decisions, educate and mobilize for global citizen participation, and advocate on vital issues of international peace and justice," tells the story of Shi Tao, who was sentenced to 10 years in prison last April in China. The crime was "providing state secrets to foreign entities". According to the report in the Forum , he gave the Asia Democracy Forum and "Democracy News", a website, information about an order for censorship in China. One group, "Reporters Without Borders" (RSF) found themselves surprised by the facility with which the Chinese authorities had apprehended Mr. Shi Tao. He had carefully used an anonymous Yahoo Mail account to send the emailed information.

Article Author: Howard Dratch

Howard writes on science, books, movies and news for Blogcritics and on his own blogs from the border of North and Central America.

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