Future of the Internet

"Spafford appears to recognize the delicate condition of today's Net, and he believes that a pause in expansion is needed--a bit of time to digest the problems that beset it." (Zittrain 240) These words of computer scientist Gene Spafford couldn't be more true. It's one thing to give everyone in the world digital access, but it's quite another to properly educate them about the ways of the Internet. Spafford recognizes the sheer difficulty of teaching everyone about proper IT use; sure we can give a laptop to everyone, but how will they know how to use it? How will they know how to combat viruses? Without training, using the Internet is a futile effort.

Giving some poor country access to the Internet is like giving a person an airplane without telling them how to fly it. Learning how to use the Internet and follow proper IT procedure is crucial in educating poor countries about the digital world. If we don't teach these impoverished people how to combat infections inside the computer, let alone teach them how to use a simple search engine, they might as well not have a laptop.

Lack of education isn't the only potential pitfall of the rapidly growing phenomenon known as the Internet. Individuals in third world countries and other poor areas across the world will be introduced to sites such as YouTube. This particular website has two potential problems that can greatly affect the virgin eyes of naive paupers. First, uneducated users will come across videos that are inappropriate, vulgar, or downright offensive. I can't even imagine some young kid in Africa typing in their hometown in the search engine and finding a video about a past genocide of his people. He doesn't know how to avoid these videos because he has been neither trained to do such things nor has he ever had exposure to such things.

Another pitfall of sites such as YouTube is the "comments" section below the video. Educated Internet users have been trained to read inappropriate comments as junk and dismiss anything and everything they say. However, let's say an impoverished boy in a third world country has a laptop and goes on YouTube to watch a video about his ethnicity. After watching the video, he scrolls down (and that's only possible if he has been taught how to scroll down, thus proving my point that without digital education, even the simple task of scrolling up and down can seem impossible) and begins to read the comments others have posted. He reads some horrifying things; racial slurs and ignorant ethnic stereotypes are but a few of the terrible things the young boy will encounter. Without knowing that certain people use the comments section of a video for their own public bashing of other cultures and things, the young boy will probably become horrified and take serious offense to the comments. And, even worse, if the boy doesn't understand the comments, he might start using the horrible language utilized by those individuals and thus contribute to the ongoing cultural ignorance of the comments section.

If we want the world to live as one in a digital age, we must not only supply everyone with the technology needed to participate, but also with the knowledge and training needed to use the Internet effectively and properly. And, since we are nowhere near that point in this current time, I agree with Spafford's assessment: we must try to halt the expansion of the Internet in order to help the rest of the world catch up in technology and digital intelligence.

Source used: http://futureoftheinternet.org/static/ZittrainTheFutureoftheInternet.pdf