The internet continues the cant of the tale of progress - a wonderful story but still a mythology that does not account for other ways of knowing, for world excluded, writes Sohail Inayatullah

Many claim that with the advent of the internet, the future has arrived. The dream of an interconnected planet where physical labour becomes minimally important and knowledge creation becomes the source of value and wealth appears to be here. Middle-men are no longer needed, consumers can deal directly with producers, information is transparent, and prices will reflect real costs plus incentive-based profits. The invisible hand will finally work as Adam Smith meant it to, balancing self-love with love for the other. Large corporations will not have advantages over small businesses since information will be accessible to all. Advantage will go those who work hard and are innovative, and not to those who can manipulate the market through size or inside-information, as in the Industrial era.

Critics point out that while the "cyber/information era" maybe a step forward, it is still too early to celebrate. Among other problems, two-thirds of the world does not have a phone and much of the world lives over two hours from a phone connection. While new technologies have speeded up time for the elite West and the elite in the non-West, for the majority of the world there is no high-tech information era. In the hyperjump to starspace, of internet stocks that forever rise, appearing to have no limits - like Michael Jordan, jumping upwards and never landing – we have forgotten that there may be cyclical processes, such as the life and death of individuals, nations and civilisations, that cannot be so easily transformed. We have also become oblivious of the power of the most wealthy. The world's richest people in the world have assets that exceed the combined GDP of the 48 least developed nations, and the world's 225 richest individuals have a combined wealth of over 1trillion US$, equal to the annual income of the poorest 47% of the entire world's population.

This is not to say there are not fundamental changes going on in the structure of the world economy. For example, more people are making their living by processing ideas, bettering their financial condition. Bill Halal, author of The New Capitalism, writes that in the US "Blue-collar workers should dwindle from 20% of the US work force in 1995 to 10% or less within a decade or two. ...non-professional white-collar workers [will be reduced] from 40% to 20%-30%. The remaining 60%-70% or so of the work force may then be composed of knowledge workers. ...meanwhile, productivity, living standards and the quality of life will soar to unprecedented levels." More and more, we are moving from blue collar to white collar to no collar workers. The Think Tank Directory reports that the number of think-tanks in the US have exploded from 62 in 1945 to 1200 in 1996. Even Queensland has "the Brisbane Institute" and the "Noosa Institute for the Future".

But ask skeptics, are we are engaged in a non-productive financial/information pyramid scheme where we are moving further and further away from food production and manufacturing, building virtualities on virtualites until there is nothing there, wherein the world is maya, an illusion? Jeremy Rifkin, author of The End of Work forecasts that current labour trends will lead to a world where only 20% will work.

What will happen during environmental crisis or wars? Yugoslavs
"survived" the recent war because they lived in an economy that was balanced, that had some degree of self-reliance, some connection with agriculture. Australia and other OECD nations are unlikely to survive such wrenching crisis.

Taking such a critical stance, the coming of the information era, ostensibly providing untold riches in bytes of freedom for all, in fact, limits the futures of others because it robs them of their future alternatives by amplifying the worldview of the dominant. Dominance has merely moved from General Motors to Microsoft, and while there are claims of increased equity, the data points out that the trend is toward greater inequity with the share of global income between the world's rich and the world's poor doubling from 30-1 in 1960 to 59 to 1, in 1989. The information revolution will have to be quite dramatic to reverse these figures.

Reality has become constructed as the worldwideweb, but perhaps this web is Max Weber's iron cage - the future with no exit, wherein there is an inverse relationship between data and wisdom, between quick bytes and long term commitment, between engagement to technology and engagement with humans, plants and animals. In our hurry to embrace information, it is not even that wisdom is lost but the far more important state and process of transcendence.


The great leap forward

But for optimists, cybertechnologies are already creating a global ecumene, beginning the process of if not heaven on earth, at least earth in heaven. The new technologies give more choice, endless choice and freedom. Bill Gates believes "it will affect the world seismically, rocking us in the same way the discovery of the scientific method, the invention of printing, and the arrival of the Information Age did." Author of Being Digital, Nicholas Negroponte writes, "while the politicians struggle with the baggage of history, a new generation is emerging from the digital landscape free of many of the old prejudices. These kids are released from the limitation of geographic proximity as the sole basis of friendship, collaboration, play, and neighbourhood. Digital technology can be a natural force drawing people into greater world harmony." (Obviously Negroponte did not anticipate the way the new technologies would be used in war, as we saw in Yugoslavia recently, with information jamming and website takeovers – the traumas of history, unless confronted, are not so easily forgotten).

Douglas Rushkoff believes that computers are creating a generation gap between the "screenagers" and others, with screenagers having the most important skill of all - multi-tasking, choosing and doing many things at the same. Along with the dramatic ageing of society, where one our of every four will be over 65, clear fault lines are developing between the generations. This generation gap is far more pronounced in Asian nations where tradition, modernity and postmodernity are already at dangerous odds with each other. Moreover, what Rushkoff does not mention is that women have always had to do many things at the same time, taking care of the home and children as well as other types of formal and informal work. Women have always been experts at multi-tasking. It is only recently that men have discovered this art. Indeed, the entire vision of the Net appears to be the nocturnal fantasy of a hormone overwhelmed 18-year-old male.

But not all women take such a critical approach. Dale Spender writes that "Cyberspace has the potential to be egalitarian, to bring everyone into a network arrangement. It has the capacity to create community; to provide untold opportunities for communication, exchange and keeping in touch." In a research project in Queensland, Margaret Grace, June Lennie and colleagues studied rural women, investigating how the Net helped them escape their geographical loneliness. Through their web-chat rooms, they connected to each other, felt empowered by having access to information, and gained confidence by becoming Net savvy. But when discussions turned from the mundane to points of difference there were no spaces for communication – issues of aboriginal rights, feminism and other contentious issues were far more problematic.

The issue then is what type of world culture and economy? The new technologies certainly create wealth, indeed, a jump in wealth, promising a transformational society where the future is always beckoning, with a new discovery every year. Ismail Serageldin compiles an impressive array of statistics. "Items in the Library of Congress are doubling every 14 years and, at the rate things are going, will soon be developing every 7 years. ...In the US, there are 55,000 trade books published annually. ...The gap of scientists and engineers in North and South is vast with 3800 per million in the US and 200 per million in the South. ... [Finally], currently a billion email messages pass between 35 million users, and the volume of traffic on the Internet is doubling every 10 months." Of course, why anyone would want to count email messages is the key issue - as ridiculous would be to count the number of words said daily through talking, or perhaps even count the silence between words.

But for the information era proponents, the oppressive dimensions of bounded identity - to nation, village, gender, culture - will all disappear as we move in and out of identities and communities, as we create networked communicative societies. It is the end of scarcity as an operating myth and the beginning of abundance, of information that wants to be free. But while the growth data looks impressive and the stock of Microsoft continues upward, there are many hidden costs. For example, what of negative dimensions of the new technologies such as surveillance? Police in Brisbane, Australia use up to 100 hidden cameras in malls to watch for criminal activities. Hundreds more are anticipated creating an electronic grid in central Brisbane. While this might be possibly benign in Brisbane (those who do not fit into the norms of Australian society, who are seen as guilty by their outward appearance, Aborigines, for example, might have a different views). Imagining a large grid over Milosevic's Yugoslavia or Taliban's Afghanistan is enough to frighten the most fanatical techno-optimist. Or is it? Many believe that privacy issues will be forgotten dimensions of the debate on cyberfutures once we each have our own self-encryptors so that no one can read or enter us (the 21st century chastity belt). Technology will tame technology. Over time, the benefits of the new technologies will become global with poverty, homelessness and anomie all wiped out. All will eventually have access - even the poorest - as the billions of brains that we are, once connected, will solve the many problems of oppression. While we have always imagined such a future, it is only now that technology allows it so.


Sharing meaning or watching Neighbours

While cyber-enthusiasts rightfully point to the opportunities of the one world created by new technologies, they thus forget that the one world of globalism remains fundamentally unequal with the local (local economy and power over one's future) increasingly under attack. The tiny Pacific Island of Niue recently discovered that 10% of its national revenue was being sucked out through international sex-line services. A recent UNESCO research project coordinated by the World Futures Studies Federation on information and communication technologies (ICTs) found that while Pacific islands desire the new technologies, they want to ensure that their diffusion is linked to basic needs, to poverty alleviation. They also want to ensure that ICT transfer is not just about dumping old computers onto poor nations in the Pacific or in Africa but about programs that include software, servicing, institutional support and a development partnership with issues of hierarchy (where the head bureaucrat proudly displays his new gadget on his lare desk; a fetish he will most likely never use) are dealt with. The research also found that individuals were deeply concerned over foreign content, wanting to not just be information consumes but producers of their own web sites, cdroms, and other post-industrial products. Fatma Aloo of the Tanzanian Media Women's Association argues that ICTs are a necessary evil. Those on the fringe – women and other marginalised groups – must use and design them for their own purposes. Without being part of the design process, merely consumers, they will find themselves further left behind.

But these concerns are usually not met. Instead, intellectuals invent metaphors of postmodernity and post-industrialism, capital continues to accumulate unevenly, the poor become poorer and the less powerful become even weaker (however, they can now have a website). The information era still exists in the context of the world capitalist system - it is not an external development of it, and it will not create the contradictions that transform it. As commnication theorist, Cees Hamelink writes, "The institutional arrangements within which ICTs functions are largely defined by the rules of the capitalist market economy which … thrives on a conception of people as instrumental to each other's objectives. It is difficult to believe that the system can be beneficial to a constructive cultural pluralism." Or in far tougher language, the Indian thinker Sarkar believes that the information era merely continues the commodification of intellectuals, making them the bootlickers of capitalists. Certainly Bill Gates boots are likely to be very clean.

The knowledge society or non-material society that many futurists imagine conveniently forgets humans' very real suffering. But for virtual realities, we have virtual theories. The challenge then for those who do not wish to collaborate is to imagine and design alternative institutional arrangements for information and communication technologies. "The challenge is to propose structures of ownership, funding and public accountability that can accommodate the requirements of cultural pluralism" that is create a cultural ecology of ICTs. To do so, ICTs will need to be taken out of their relative "tool-centric" worldview in which they are seen as culturally and linguistically neutral.

National information policy thus must be seen not just as an issue of more technologies, or the numbers of people that own a computer or hours on the Net, but as well how about who is being excluded, and about which ways of knowing are we relegating to extinction. For the information era to be more than soliloquy posing as conversation, we will need to focus on communication, on the sharing of meaning, and how new technologies create new meanings. This means creating a communicative-inclusive multicultural society, and not an artificial, virtual society where the only thing that is real is the speed of information.

However, by posing policy questions in technocratic terms, cybertechnologies create a model of the governance, of problem solving that does not adequately take into account issues of culture, organizational politics and our historical identities. For example, telecommuting or working from home is considered a technological solution to transport problems and to reducing office costs. What is often not addressed is that work also has a social function, we meet marriage partners there, for example. We define ourselves in terms of the size of our office. Moreover, in the Australian context, telecommuting merely continues the anomie of a suburbanised society, where connection means the entire nation-watching Neighbours together.


Immediacy and distance

Communication research on e-mail culture points out that the twin dangers of immediacy and speed do not lead to greater community and friendship, rather, they often lead to bitter misunderstandings, exacerbating minor differences. Not only do bosses use email to berate employees, creating considerable ill-will and inefficiencies but employees end up defining productivity as time spent cruising on the Net. But it is communication that suffers the most. Diane Morse Houghten writes, "E-mail leaves a lot of blank spaces in what we say, which the recipient tends to fill with the most negative interpretation". E-mail then is perhaps not the great connector leading to higher levels of information but the great disconnector that gives the mirage of connection and community. E-mail without occasional face-to-face communication can transform friendships into antagonistic relationships. Just as words lose the informational depth of silence, e-mail loses information embedded in silence and face-to-face gestures.

The assimilation and reflection as well as the intuition and the insight needed to make sense of intellectual and emotional data are lost as the urgent need to respond to others quickens. Time on the screen is different from time spent gazing at sand in the desert, wandering through mountains or playing with loved ones. Screen time does not slow the heart beat down relaxing one into the super-conscious – into samadhi, satori, or grace - rather we become lost in endless data, creating an era of accelerating information but certainly not a knowledge future or a future where the subtle mysteries of the world, the spiritual - the depth of the ever present, positive silence - are felt. In the rush to the postmodern, slow time, lunar time, women's time, spiritual timeless time, cyclical rise and fall time and circular seasonal time are among the victims, leading to temporal impoverishment, a loss of temporal diversity. The hurried society of the moderns becomes further agitated in the postindustrial information era, in hyper-capitalism. When in times of crisis, when the Net goes down, what will we do then, where will we go for our information-fix, will we have the courage to confront the spaces in our own minds?

The quickening and transformation of the self was anticipated by McLuhan in 1980. "Excessive speed of change isolates already fragmented individuals. At the speed [speech] of light man [sic] has neither goals, objectives or private identity. He is an item in the data bank - software only, easily forgotten - and deeply resentful." Selves lose reflective space, jumping from one object to another, one website to another, one e-mail to another. It is not a communicative world that will transpire but a world of selves downloading their emotional confusion onto each other. Writes Zia Sardar, in his book, Cyberfutures: "Far from creating a community based on consensus, the information technologies could easily create states of alienated and atomised individuals, glued to their computer terminal, terrorising and being terrorised by all those whose values conflict with their own." We will become information psychic, our thoughts interpenetrating the thoughts of others, creating a global schizophrenia

Cybertechnologies create not just rich and poor in terms of access to information, but a planet inhabited with cyborgs, living in dramatically different worlds. What is shared is a commitment to quick money and quick time, a world where data and information are far more important than knowledge, wisdom and transcendence. However, there are clear short-term advantages to swiftness. Young boys who grow up on Nintendo and Sega, who, while behind in traditional literacy measures, are way ahead in the measures of the future, on familiarity with movement on the Net.

But any time we become fixated one type of time, there will be imbalances, the entire world of these youngsters will be fixated on light speed. How they will deal with projects that require years to develop will be one of the grand questions twenty years from now. Their impatience with industrial society project will make the quick fix of American movies and presidencies seem turtle-like. Most likely we will see this age-cohort create cybergovernance, quick decisions, apparently public since all will be on the Net, but still anonymous, and still without the longer time horizon one needs for reflection, one needs to learn from mistakes, from thinking. Combined with advances in genetics, artificial intelligence, nano-technology, it will be an artificial world that they will create; one wherein the difference between the natural and the artificial will no longer exist. The Green view of sustainability will disappear into history, with nature having been captured and given its own website.

The grand question is: will our lives be meaningfully changed by the information revolution; or does the ICT hype merely replace the classical opiate of religion and the modernist idea of progress? Do ICTs create new futures or do they impoverish our imagination of alternative futures, particularly our geographic imagination. Quoting Heidegger, critic Kevin Robbins reminds us that the end of distance is not the creation of nearness, of intimacy, of community. "We are content to live in a world of `uniform distanceless,' that is, in an information space rather than a space of vivacity and experience." There is the illusion of community - in which we can create virtual communities far and away but still treat our neighbours, partners and children like shit. The Net has opened up a gateway to a new world, to Oz, but once there, we are in danger of losing our way back home.

The only home left will be virtual.