Let’s remember how benign the internet can be

In 2002, when the internet was still in its infancy, the philosopher Bernard Williams wrote:

Moreover, the Internet shows signs of creating for the first time what Marshall McLuhan prophesied as a consequence of television, a global village, something that has the disadvantages both of globalization and of a village. Certainly it does offer some reliable sources of information for those who want it and know what they are looking for, but equally it supports that mainstay of all villages, gossip. It constructs proliferating meeting places for the free and unstructured exchange of messages which bear a variety of claims, fancies, and suspicions, entertaining, superstitious, scandalous, or malign. The chances that many of these messages will be true are low, and the probability that the system itself will help anyone pick out the true ones is even lower. In this respect, post-modern technology may have returned dialectically to a transmuted version of the pre-modern world, and the chances of acquiring true beliefs by these means, except for those who already have knowledge to guide them, will be much like those in the Middle Ages. At the same time, the global nature of these conversations makes the situation worse than in a village, where at least you might encounter and perhaps be forced to listen to some people who had different opinions and obsessions. As critics concerned for the future of democratic discussion have pointed out, the Internet makes it easy for large numbers of previously isolated extremists to find each other and talk only among themselves.

Prescient words — indeed much-quoted on the internet of late — whose bleak thought is only too well confirmed by various recent and ongoing events.

So sometimes we do need to remind ourselves about just how many small corners of the internet are thoroughly benign and life-affirming, delightful sources of innocent entertainment or diverting information, helping us to enjoy the off-line, real world, all the better.

Here’s a lovely example. When Ben Colburn, now a philosophy professor in Glasgow, was a student here twenty years ago (twenty years? ye gods and little fishes!), he started a website in which he recorded his explorations of the old parish churches in and around Cambridge, eventually ranging over all Cambridgeshire and sometimes a bit beyond (with photographs by his partner Mark Ynys-Mon). I’ve just seen that, now at last, all 206 churches are finally listed, the labour of love finishing appropriately enough with Great St Mary’s in Cambridge: “I decided that there would be something narratively satisfying about the very final church I wrote about being the church which sits at the centre of Cambridgeshire, and at the start of our journey.” Ben is a terrific guide, and revisiting the site certainly has me eagerly planning days out for when I can drive again. So warm thanks to him!

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