It’s hard to answer the question of whether technology is good, evil, or neither. But one thing we can assert – it’s what you do with it that counts.
Washington Post: The Web as Weapon:
…”The technology of the Internet facilitated everything,” declared a posting this spring by the Global Islamic Media Front, which often distributes Zarqawi messages on the Internet. Today’s Web sites are “the way for everybody in the whole world to listen to the mujaheddin.”
Little more than a year ago, this online empire did not exist. Zarqawi was an Internet nonentity, a relatively obscure Jordanian who was one of many competing leaders of the Iraq insurgency. Once every few days, a communique appeared from him on the Web. Today, Zarqawi is an international name “of enormous symbolic importance,” as Army Lt. Gen. David Petraeus put it in a recent interview, on a par with bin Laden largely because of his group’s proficiency at publicizing him on the Internet.
By this summer, Internet trackers such as the SITE Institute have recorded an average of nine online statements from the Iraq branch of al Qaeda every day, 180 statements in the first three weeks of July. Zarqawi has gone “from zero to 60” in his use of the Internet, said Michael Scheuer, former chief of the CIA unit that tracked bin Laden. “The difference between Zarqawi’s media performance initially and today is extraordinary.”
As with most breakthroughs, it was a combination of technology and timing. Zarqawi launched his jihad in Iraq “at the right point in the evolution of the technology,” said Ben N. Venzke, whose firm IntelCenter monitors jihadist sites for U.S. government agencies. High-speed Internet access was increasingly prevalent. New, relatively low-cost tools to make and distribute high-quality video were increasingly available. “Greater bandwidth, better video compression, better video editing tools — all hit the maturity point when you had a vehicle as well as the tools,” he said.
BBC NEWS: Tim Berners-Lee on the read/write web:
TBL: …I feel that we need to individually work on putting good things on it, finding ways to protect ourselves from accidentally finding the bad stuff, and that at the end of the day, a lot of the problems of bad information out there, things that you don’t like, are problems with humanity.
This is humanity which is communicating over the web, just as it’s communicating over so many other different media. I think it’s a more complicated question we have to; first of all, make it a universal medium, and secondly we have to work to make sure that that it supports the sort of society that we want to build on top of it.
TBL: …It’s a new medium, it’s a universal medium and it’s not itself a medium which inherently makes people do good things, or bad things. It allows people to do what they want to do more efficiently. It allows people to exist in an information space which doesn’t know geographical boundaries. My hope is that it’ll be very positive in bringing people together around the planet, because it’ll make communication between different countries more possible.
But on the other hand I see it as a substrate for humanity, I see it as something on which humanity will do what humanity does and the questions as to what we as individuals and we collectively do, are still just as important and just as much as before, up to us.
TBL: …The idea was that anybody who used the web would have a space where they could write and so the first browser was an editor, it was a writer as well as a reader. Every person who used the web had the ability to write something. It was very easy to make a new web page and comment on what somebody else had written, which is very much what blogging is about.
TBL: Some people tell me. I suppose the question is to what extent the people use it for things which should seriously concern us. For example, are people using the web to get information about how to do illegal things, whether it’s to make explosives, how to kill people, poison people, or whatever it is. So there’s a certain amount of danger that this tool can be used for bad purposes. It’s a very powerful tool.
ML: And you’ve never had a sleepless night over that?
TBL: No I haven’t. I haven’t had a sleepless night over it because I suppose I’m so much more surrounded by the good things that people are doing with it. There are lots of positive stories of people doing great things, putting educational information out there for people in developing countries and things, for example. There’s a huge spirit of goodness. Most of the people I meet who are developing the web are focused on all those things.
BusinessWeek: Craig Newmark: The Net’s Free Force:
“In a way, I’ve only had one idea,” says Newmark. “Everything comes from the community.”
Newmark may be the host of the world’s most inclusive happening. In the 1990s, when the tech boom turned the Web into a story about wealth and elitism, Newmark was all about giving the little guy a break. While craigslist charges for help-wanted ads posted in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York — at $25 to $75 per ad — elsewhere the listings are free.
That democratic ethos has fueled astonishing growth. The site now spans 34 countries, with listings for 175 cities from Burlington, Vt., to Bangalore. Nielsen/NetRatings says the site’s 5.7 million readers — double the total a year ago — generate 1.5 billion page views a month, making it the ninth-biggest U.S. portal, alongside megasites such as Yahoo! (YHOO ) Consultant Classified Intelligence reckons the site drew $10 million in revenue last year. But Newmark refuses to talk about sales or anything so crass as a business model. “Craigslist is about authenticity,” says Howard Rheingold, an authority on online communities. “Craig has paid his dues, and people respect him.”
In the early days of the Net, skeptics predicted that virtual communities like craigslist would sink in a sludge of digital vandalism. Newmark proved them wrong. Amid meteoric growth, he and a staff of four police the site, aided by snazzy software and scores of folks who e-mail daily, alerting him to scammers. “We don’t run the site. The people who use it run it,” he insists. While he has worked at times with prosecutors to put people in jail, “I have no Batman fantasies except recreationally,” he jokes.
Like most successful Web phenomena, the site is also a disruptive force, striking fear among newspaper publishers who rely on classifieds revenue. Newmark regrets undercutting other businesses, but he’s also eager to contribute to community journalism. He has a blog at cnewmark.com and hopes craigslist can serve as a forum for volunteer journalists who can take on hard-hitting topics, including investigative stories. “I’d be willing to pay,” he says.
Related: N-Ten, Fundable.org.