Naivety of an online evangelist

Looking back over a career isn’t something I waste time much on.  But sometimes my mind drifts back.  And sometimes I wonder at how I spent so much time and effort, all those years ago, in the aid of a cause that would seem to have ended so badly. 

I was one of many who were convinced, back then in the 1980s and 1990s, that extending knowledge and enlightenment, the basic aim of the profession I found myself in, was bound up with the emerging world of the digital and the online. 

In 1975, when I started, across from my cataloguer’s desk in the library of University College, Cardiff, sat Mel Collier.  Mel’s title was Automation Librarian.  His job was to turn the Library’s paper-based catalogue into electronic form.  It was years before the catalogue was online – for a while it was output as ‘microfiche’ – but that was the start of a technological revolution.  We were the first people in the University to grasp it, apart from the white-coated IT geeks who jealously minded their mainframes.

A few years later, online made its debut.  Nick Smith, our representative of a new generation of switched-on librarians, taught us how to make remote searches of specialist databases, using a primitive instrument called a modem, a telephone headset cupped in a wooden box that emitted a constant stream of high-pitched data-squeaks.  This, we thought, was the future, not realising that before long everyone would be able to search online for themselves.

Later still, in Swansea, the coming of the internet opened the door towards general, direct access to online knowledge.  The Library was the first part of the university to make networked PCs openly available to all students.  We began to use the word ‘disintermediation’.  Librarians ceased to be gatekeepers to knowledge, and instead we became ‘brokers’, buying and leasing online sources so that our readers could make direct use of them.

And then, in the National Library of Wales, came another phase of the revolution.  The Library began to digitise, on a large scale – books, periodicals, pictures and other kinds of analogue material.  Then we’d make all this digital information available, freely and opening, to anyone who wished to use it, online.  Knowledge had been dis-placed, released from its physical shelves and allowed to fly out of the library’s windows.  (The library as a physical resource, we knew, would decline, but that was a price worth paying.)

There was a consistent belief behind all these developments: that giving people easier access to more information through electronic means would lead to all kinds of good.  The sum of knowledge would increase.  It would be shared more easily.  It would aid learning, spur research, spark creativity.  It would stimulate conversation, no longer confined to a single place but extending in principle around the globe.  The whole world would be become a vast library, with a shared mission, to create a richer, better-informed, more humane future.

Today, ideas like these look utopian and simple-minded.  It seems that the internet has become awash with lies, hatred and exploitation.  Understanding is no one’s aim.  Instead, the billionaires who control the prison enclosures that have replaced the open Web invented by Tim Berners-Lee – Facebook, ‘X’, TikTok, Instagram and the rest – use their algorithms to reward whatever is shocking, perverted and bigoted.  Unscrupulous politicians have learned the potency of this new internet for spreading, swiftly and to millions, their reactionary, atavistic doctrines.  Young people, enslaved to their smartphones and social media, fall easy prey to anti-knowledge: conspiracy theories, pressures to conform to false images, and crude ideas of masculinity many of us had thought long dead.  And most people have embraced the online world so completely that they’ve deserted the physical world, like the shops of the old high street and, yes, physical libraries.

The idealism of many of us in the early online age was understandable.  Back then, online access was much less general, and was confined in the beginning to groups, like academics, who naturally shared traditional respect for concepts like truth, objectivity and enlightenment (leaving aside post-modernist sceptics).  Once access became near-universal, such values could be marginalised, especially by powerful companies and politicians, who easily recognised chances for profit and power through promoting negative elements of online culture.

It’s easy to give way to despair and regret the naïve online enthusiasm of the past.  Some writers try to pin much of the blame for the ills of contemporary society on the always-on world of the smartphone.  Jonathan Haidt, in his recent book The anxious generation, attributes ever-higher rate of depression and self-harm in children and adolescents to what he calls ‘the great rewiring of childhood’ and especially the ubiquity of social media, with its instantaneous access to gaming, pornography, ‘influencers’ and other forms of exploitation.

But are things quite so simple?  Is it right to cast a technology, however transformative, as the main villain?  Is not the relationship between mental health and smartphone use one of correlation rather than causation?  There are concerns, weightier even than social media and their ill-effects, that bear down on children and adults alike.  Increases in poverty caused by gross inequalities in wealth and income, the housing crisis, extreme instability in politics around the world, anxiety about climate and habitat destruction: all these and many more ‘real world’ problems surely cause more anxiety and distress than the pressures of the online universe.

To return to the question of knowledge, it’s beyond question that the wired world has made it easier for untruths to flourish.  But it’s equally plain that everyone now has access to vastly more ‘real’, potentially dependable knowledge than at any time in human history.  That, surely, is a blessing of the online revolution: that, in a few seconds, we can call up historical data, for example, or verify someone’s version of an event on the spot.  We now take these gains for granted, and their benefits are drowned out by concerns, and sometimes moral panic, about the harms of the internet. 

In other words, all those years of working towards a digital future were not in vain, after all, even though we were naïve and should probably have foreseen that universal, instantaneous internet access was always going to lead to negative results as well as positive ones.

And the answer to exposing people, particularly children and young people, to the ills of online?  ‘Sheltering’ them through verifications, bans and legal measures can go so far, but the real answer is education.  For example, a key skill taught in schools should be the ability to evaluate online, indeed all, information, to consider its source and the motivation of its originator, to discriminate between reliable and dubious evidence.  In short, critical thinking.  Alas, critical thinking isn’t often a priority area of the curriculum for those who set the rules of our education system and who prefer children not to ask too many difficult questions.