KEY POINTS:
Andrew Keen, a British-American hi-tech boomer, has written a combative counterblast against the cacophonous web.
In his The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's internet is Killing our Culture and Assaulting our Economy (not, admittedly, a nifty title) Keen argues that the world is being wrecked by
the glut of noisy views, "news" and the permissive licentiousness of the internet.
He joins the band of doubters, of whom I have long been one, even though some of my good friends are compulsive bloggers, more charged up by the net than by, for example, sex or chocolate.
Others are web addicts. One came disgracefully late to dinner the other day because she was lost in Second Life (sorry to bring it up, S) and another took me to lunch and never looked into my eyes, lost in his bloody BlackBerry.
All around Le Caprice, many others were indulging in the same pleasure, playing with the cheeky machines sitting indecently on their crotches. It was not nice.
Children have been infected by the bug, and their resistance is low to non-existent. Having brought up two kids born 16 years apart, I can tell you that life for the young under rampant Thatcherism now seems Elysian.
Kids might have become consumers too young, wanting things they didn't need, but today the internet is consuming them, their time, friendships, money, selfhood, childhood and brain.
A survey of six- to 18-year-olds shows most using the electronic media for seven hours a day. Professor Susan Greenfield and other scientists are exploring the possibility that such exposure could alter the characteristics of the human brain.
What we know for sure is that the wirestorm has had both a vitalising and a vandalising effect on popular culture, conversation, behaviour, politics and the media.
The internet is taking humans to places beyond the wildest, absinthe-addled imaginings of poets or painters. Consider it our Industrial Revolution, only dizzyingly speedier.
How fast it forwards progress, energises democracy, demolishes class and race barriers, opens up entrepreneurship and frees up knowledge and information, in particular facts that reveal the duplicity of leaders and corrupt institutions.
In dictatorships the net gives voice to dissenters. All potentially good stuff, but hark the soothsayers, trembling with trepidation, keeping timely vigilance.
I use the net to seek out products, for research, and to propagate my own ideas and activities. But, being an experienced journalist, I do not use the internet as a vomit bag. My thoughts are worked over and then edited.
Most of what appears in cyberspace is what Keen terms rampant "digital narcissism". The pace being what it is, we can barely register what is happening. It is like looking out of a car window on a motorway as you pass changing images only fleetingly, adding up to nothing you can describe to yourself. Left at the end of the journey is a taste of haste and slight fear.
James Harkin, TV producer and manifestly a seer, has given an apt name to the habitat of the new net flickers: Cyburbia, where now "marketers, venture capitalists and media behemoths are piling in to exploit this orgy ofself-expression".
We the wary are damned as Luddites, elitists and, most hurtfully, censors. We are apparently similar to high churchmen who tried to prevent ordinary folk understanding the Bible because controlling that knowledge gave the Church terrible power.
But the people too can have terrible power. Today they blast away in their blogs to threaten, libel, bully, intimidate and turn freedom itself into a hostage. I have had to put up with all the above.
Instead of one or two loathsome Richard Littlejohns, we have millions of shock-jocks. And as many citizens on the make, prowling, hunting for shaky images of crime and stars in disarray.
The lowest point reached so far was the father of two killing himself this month in front of his webcam.
Child abuse, violent porn, racism, religious fanaticism and political extremism grow ever more virulent on the net.
Not everybody who is burning to say or show things is worth it. And people who endanger the lives and peace of others should not be spreading their demagoguery without checks and balances.
Instead of guarding against the menace, politicians, broadcasters and newspapers - shaken by the populist explosion - have succumbed to the numbers and might of the mob mentality.
"Citizen journalists" is the respectable name given to the malign creeps who now pull and push the news and current affairs agenda.
Behaviour in streets and schools gets worse as rude Cyburbia changes the rules of social interaction. The lunatics own the asylum now, and everyone wants to be a shareholder in the new business of making abusive mayhem.
Norbert Weiner, who coined the term "cybernetics" in 1949, warned that such progress was a double-edged sword.
It obviously benefited humanity, but, he warned, "[if we] follow our traditional worship of progress and the fifth freedom - the freedom to exploit - it is practically certain that we shall have to face ... more ruin and despair".
I fear we are way down that road and no brakes can stop us now.
- INDEPENDENT
