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The Internet, the Pope, and the iPod
5/23/2005
For a moment I caution myself on not becoming too sanguine. “It is, after all, only a technology, and like all technologies—a sword, the atom bomb, a telephone line—it can be used for good as well as for ill. Don’t get so carried away that you lose your highly honed, Freudian sense of human nature, Tracy.” True enough, for didn’t the 9/11 terrorists use computer terminals in libraries and the Internet to communicate their deadly intensions? But something optimistic still pulls at me. But for this technology I would have never met, much less made friends with the man from Sudan, a country at terrible odds with the US currently. And Vietnam? All I could think when I met this young man was of my own youthful attachment to older cousins who joined the anti-war movement and all that sixties and seventies history. I surprisingly felt embarrassed when I introduced myself. Because I am a US citizen would he automatically hate me? Did he have family who died in the awful conflict? What did he want, or expect, from me? And yet, we forged a sense of shared ethics about learning and the rigors of academic study. Since I cherish higher education, these shared ethics hold particular meaning to me, a value pooled by this extraordinary technology. And isn’t there something similar in the feel of watching the funeral procession in St. Peters, or even dangling those white wires from my ears in unison with consumers globally?
The Italians use the word “exploit” differently than English-speaking people. While we have negative connotations for it, the Italians mean it in the sense of realizing potential. In that sense, we should “exploit” the Internet, this great and auspicious opportunity to realize a global tool for communication. We need more people like that fellow from Utah who seek through language to internationalize Internet accessibility. Contrary to protectionist currents in contemporary US politics, we should delight in the fact that someone in Bangalore can do the work of an information technology or customer service professional for someone in New Jersey. We should want to know more about and from our Muslim brothers and sisters, and not all just from American print media or TV. How differently would we see intervention in Iraq or democracy in Indonesia if we had the hallowed chance to talk to someone from one of those countries? How, through Internet dialogue, can we support our Chinese compatriots who risk their lives everyday to exercise that most fundamental of American values: freedom of expression?
There is something “catholic”—with a small “c:”
universal, general—about the Internet, the Pope, and the iPod for me.
And while I am still too close to the experience of this spring to know what
it all means, I do recognize that it has explosive, exploitable, and very possibly
hopeful potentialities.
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