The Internet at home - a member of the family

When computers became accessible in the 1960s, I soon worked out what I wanted them to do for me - and more and more, they could do them. Now they have reached the stage where they do more than I want, and I cannot always get them to do simple things that they used to. It’s like having a farm-horse that has turned into a racehorse.

The Internet is now a racehorse with bells on, and the computers that host them cannot stand still either. The IT brains must keep on thinking of new things in order to keep their jobs; the young keep wanting new things; and as with every invention of humanity, baddies use it for ill, and interfere with new ways to hack, cheat, lure and upset.

There must be millions of us who have only three simple wishes for the Internet - to be able to find anything in a moment; to be able to receive and send any sort of message in a moment, and for it never to break down or tangle up on our computers. Not so long ago these would have been Three Magic Wishes. Today only the last wish remains in the realm of the fairy tale. But fairy tale it still is. Goblins, boggles and efts inhabit cyberspace, as well as Nigerian scams and snake oils for men.

With the Internet, we have invented a virtual world. Many people now prefer to live in it, with avatars of themselves, friends with none of the complex realities of real friendships, games that need never stop, and buying and selling imaginary property.

Now we find, instantaneously, time-tables, phone numbers, houses we might like to buy, and weather-maps with radar to show rain coming across (in my case, Victoria and usually, it seems avoiding Melbourne!). You can read newspapers from all over the world. You can get transcripts and podcasts of radio programs. The doctor says you have something with a long Latin name, having looked it up on the Internet. You go home and find out all about it too. The baby cries. You go to the Internet.

See the world with Google maps taken from space - your own house. See the proof of what man does to the world: for example, in the Earth seen from space at night. Introduce anyone from age three to 100 to the natural sciences with a ten-minute video overview that starts with Space and moves in by factors of ten until it reaches a proton in a cell in a leaf on a tree in a forest in Florida.

I now have friends all over the world, sharing the same aims and interests. People from all over the world can use and copy my online literacy materials and half-hour literacy video. I can put up my ideas on just about anything on an ever-enlarging website, and track down others with their own realms of ideas.

I put my unpublishable manuscripts and out-of-print books up on Google Books and issuu; Lulu can print as many copies off to order as you like. Since millions of sites have the same keywords for search-engines to find, it may be unlikely that anyone can find these gems without being told - but perhaps a publisher may find one of the titles is worth bringing into the “ real world”.

Many things still have not changed that could change - in how stock exchanges and real estate and publishers’ readers operate for example. The spelling of English could be cut to one page of spelling rules, with no traps, for international communication, and popular usage determine how it is adopted.

All this is wonderful for everybody: but I wish it could stop becoming Too Much for Old People. And there are some features that make me worry for young people.

The Internet can require too much time in screen housekeeping. Emails can be a snare as they pile in - 987 messages in my email inbox, 198 unread. There are times when a computer break-down is almost a relief as a drastic way to clear up.

So many mailing lists. So many interesting places that require you to acquire IDs and passwords, and it needs more housekeeping to keep the passwords in order.

So much technical stuff you don’t know and cannot find out from the HELP sites - clues are only found by accident or from friends. So many new words and so many of them are acronyms. OLO - I can just remember that one!

So much constant updating - every few weeks or less it seems, being asked to update some application or other and most of the time with no idea whether it is essential to you or not. I don’t want all this music stuff! Yes you do, I am told, it is vital for your internet downloading or security. And the more updating, the more that some of my older documents and applications become obsolete and inaccessible, despite all the assurances of backward compatibility. I still have workable floppies from 1988 - but even the hardware I used in Scotland in the 1980s no longer exists and the disks are unreadable. Future archaeologists and even libraries in the near future are going to have problems in reading the past, even the recent past.

There comes a point when the world of the Internet does all I want from it - and later updates take away as well as add “unnecessaries”. STAY STILL, INTERNET WORLD! I want to get off here, before I lose too much. I, and possibly many others, do not want my computer and its Internet to be a new world of entertainment-plus, because we live in the real world too. We want a workhorse, not this constantly changing provider of Skypes and twitters and multimedia and multimodes with ipods and mpegs and Blackberries and ever more whatisitimusthavits. Can’t this be possible, and let the entertainment-hungry progressives go where no one has been before if they want to?

But what about energy costs and climate change? Surely we could opt for minimum standbys. My computer system has NINE standby lights when off, and more when on - and many people do leave their systems on permanently. Some of the hardware I have discarded were real fun-for-the-boys, with multi-colour lights flashing and/or revolving as if they were light-houses.

There is very little new I need from the Internet apart from that magic wish of reliability.

Oh, yes, and a truth-marker.

Two sad things that the young have to learn about the world in order to use the Internet is not to trust and not to believe, to an extent far beyond the caution needed to deal with your own real life. Internet banking? I get scores of spam messages purporting to be from my bank - I take refuge by reading none of them. (Telephone banking? The security problems are so severe it took me weeks and far too much private revelation to just get a new cheque book.)

Conspiracy theories? There is at least one about every single thing a child may encounter. It is possible to “prove” that nothing in the world ever happened or is likely to happen. Unlike a book, which is irrevocably and tangibly what it was when first printed, and further editions can be checked from the first, anything on the Internet can change its content and form and who-can-check-it. The past is continually being changed. Young writers, writing about times that I knew - and they do not - re-invent it according to their own world-view.

Every child must learn some basic security and caution going about the real world, But in the virtual world that mistrust must be even greater. Harry Potter books are prescient. Nobody may really be what or who they say they are. People can slag and slander freely. What you buy you may never receive. The only guide to any of the business transactions that are so constantly offered is to train your child, “If you feel your greed instinct rising - keep off it. It is a cheat.”

How sad.

A question, that needs further examination, is the sort of intelligence that is fostered by the Internet, compared with the sort that is fostered by reading books. The one is perhaps more techno and music-oriented, the other more capable of organising and reflecting on knowledge. Yes, non-verbal IQs are rising all over the world. Yes, young people are amazing with technical abilities that flummox their elders. But are they missing out in other aspects essential to functioning IQs in the real world of people, economics and politics?

The Swiss psychologist Piaget investigated how children develop mental schemata about the world. What contrast there must be between the schema of a child reared with a cognitive structure to adjust and accommodate from, as from, say, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, and one who has picked up whatever resonates to her from TV and surfing the Internet.

The virtual world of the Internet can take over from the real world, in the hours spent on it.

I am rather like an old lady I knew in Collingwood who still had gas lighting in the 1950s because she believed electricity seeped out of power sockets. What is happening to all these mystic waves that now take billions and billions more messages across cyberspace and in some way, surely, real space or time? Can they have any effect on anything else, or reach a tipping point? Or suppose there comes a Final Hacker?

Libraries confide all they possess to the constantly obsolescing technology of the computer. We might think back to whether the mysterious stone circles of the past could possibly be all that remains of a great civilisation that became too virtual. And then, perhaps suddenly, through obsolescence or a master hacker, all its great intangibilities just disappeared. The wood or wicker of the visible civilisation decayed; its civilisation, which was mostly cyber, was gone. Only the stones of that “Stone Age” remain.

Round the decay of our own colossal wrecks, if we have left no other memorial, what lone and level sands may one day stretch far away?

This is not being dismal or dystopic, but it does suggest that back-ups are desirable, and that those backups should not be just virtual. "Life is real, life is earnest" and level three of a computer game is not its goal.