Online perfection?

Yesterday was a fairly typical day in my tempestuous but enduring relationship with a delightful creature called Mac.

I woke early and rose excitedly to caress her into life with my fingers, and then watched as she exploded into a veritable orgy of activity designed specifically to make my life easier.

Mac is perfect to look at, and perfect to live with. She is reliable, informative, proactive, thoughtful, and super efficient.

In fact, if she wasn't a 17 inch computer I would want to marry her. Although the object of my adoration is not so much the Mac herself, but the internet I can access through her glamorous portals.

In just one hour yesterday I bought a pair of trousers on Ebay, two DVDs and a book off Amazon, some wine through Majestic, downloaded three new albums on iTunes, and ordered a fruit juicer from Harrods (I'll never use it, but it's comforting to know I could).

I then scanned four newspaper websites, including the New York Post, flicked an eye over BBC News, CNN, Arseweb (it's a FOOTBALL-related site, relax), and checked out my Vodafone and Amex online bills.

And when I'd finished I realised I'd not only saved an enormous amount of time, but also an enormous amount of money. And I had done so without moving my legs more than an inch.

And in that moment of reflection, I also realised that like millions of other Britons, the internet has become an integral part of my daily life.

Yet what is so extraordinary is not the fact of the internet's awesome power, but the ferocious speed with which it has grown into the most important and influential global phenomenon since the wheel or the aeroplane.

The first time I ever discussed the internet was at a Rupert Murdoch conference for News International executives in the summer of 1995. The venue was Hayman Island off the Great Barrier Reef in Australia and the audience included a fresh-faced Tony Blair, who had just become leader of the Labour Party.

Very few of the delegates, including dozens of the sharpest media brains in the world, thought this new-fangled computer thing would really take off.

Even Mr Murdoch, the greatest visionary the modern media world has ever seen, was unconvinced.

Yet today it is as indispensable to our children as milk and sweets.

My three young sons use the internet for almost everything you could possibly imagine. For watching TV, movies, sport, chat, buying things, selling things, listening to music, watching pop videos. It consumes their waking lives, and I see no real problem with that at all, so long as they get plenty of fresh air and vigorous football as well.

There's a lot of nonsense spouted about how computers stifle our kids' brains. But I believe it energises rather than dulls their cerebral mass, and that this generation of children has a much greater hunger for information than their predecessors, because that hunger is sated in seconds.

So they get hungry faster and more often. And self-evidently, that means they must be smarter, because they know more.

It's simple maths. And it might help explain why they all get so much higher grades these days. I don't blame the examining boards or the government, I blame the internet. It is the greatest educational tool imaginable. An almost unlimited high speed research library.

So far so good. But whereas the wheel and the plane are generally viewed as a force for good, the internet remains to many people a rather sinister entity. Ask any pensioner what they think of it and they'll say something like: ‘It's just there to help terrorists, paedophiles and pornographers.'

And that is partly, and increasingly worryingly, true.

The net was designed to be an easy way for people to communicate around the world. But like most good ideas dreamed up by nice well-intentioned people, it was quickly abused. For all the good things the internet stands for, it is undeniable that it has also become a receptacle for the more corrupt, twisted and dangerous sections of the human race.

The downside for children is of course the dark side that seeps out of every dodgy website. They all know how to tap ‘sex' into Google, and even with the most powerful firewall, nasty, salacious and perverted material can still slip through, quite literally, the net.

Pornography, and paedophilia for that matter, depends on availability and ease of access for its business model. The internet gives both in abundance. But worse than that, it also allows a cloak of secrecy and anonymity. Children can be lured, wooed, and ensnared from a dingy attic with just the click of a finger.

And that ease of access works the other way, too. I often read those dreadful stories about men being caught downloading appalling child porn sites, and wonder what really went on in their minds.

Many of them seem to be apparently normal married dads who drift into this disgusting stuff almost by ‘experimental' accident, just as a teenager might nip into a Soho clipjoint, or a cannabis user sidle into a crack cocaine den. Maybe they are indeed all predatory paedophiles. In which case the internet has proved a massively useful police tool in detecting and convicting them.

But I suspect some of them aren't; they just got sucked into something vile because it was easy. And the price they pay for being caught is often a career ruined, a family destroyed, and, in disturbingly high frequency, a rope hanging from a bedroom cupboard.

The use of the net by terrorists is another alarming example of how it can be abused in the wrong hands. Yet, again, I would imagine the police rather like terrorist operatives emailing each other - because it makes it easier to catch them.

Email is, of course, one of the other great internet gifts.

Some people moan that everyone spends too much time emailing these days, and not enough time writing letters or simply talking, like we used to. But email is a wonderful form of communication. Fast, immediate, conspiratorial, intimate, and entertaining. You can tell someone's entire character after ten emails.

The downside is spam. A cyberspace creation almost as evil as the flaccid ham-like substance they used to feed me at school.

Bill Gates said recently: ‘Like almost everyone who uses e-mail, I receive a ton of spam every day. Much of it offers to help me get out of debt or get rich quick. It would be funny if it weren't so exciting.'

Which brings me back to the web's biggest attraction, and its biggest problem: It's exciting.

You can bring the whole world to your computer in a flash. The good, bad, degrading and informative. That power is intoxicating, thrilling, and renders many of us susceptible to behaviour we might never countenance were it not for the ease of attainability.

I could spend another hour on the net today buying illicit sex, drugs, guns, and Ricin poison.

So I agree that Governments need to regulate the internet as best they can. They need to protect our children, and the weaker and more vulnerable sections of adult society from themselves, too.

But the whole point of the internet is that it remains a slightly anarchic tool.

And like a slightly unpredictable and uncontrollable new lover, it needs to be treated with care, and caution.

READERS' COMMENTS

MORE FROM ARABIANBUSINESS.COM