Avoid logging on to despair

A sceptical Dorothy Zinberg faces the dark side of internet euphoria and urges a little cyber restraint.

Long before the Nasdaq's unexpected 50 per cent plunge almost a year ago, I had begun to collect evidence that revealed the underlying problems in our dazzling internet revolution.

The digital divide continues to widen, keeping millions off the net; governments - including Russia's - charge prohibitive fees for access; for individuals, hours spent at the computer communicating with distant family and friends paradoxically can lead to social isolation and alienation; dissatisfaction with distance learning is mounting within some faculties, as are concerns that distance credentialing not only provides an inferior education but might be strengthening the two-class system of degrees that exists between elite and other degree-granting institutions.

Further, cyber-commuting from home is producing unanticipated deleterious effects, including feelings of isolation and frustration; more work can be done at home, often with a laptop and internet access, but at the expense of time spent with family and friends as the boundaries between work and home are further eroded. As governments and experts from diverse fields promote the value of parental involvement with children's education and play, new work patterns are making those goals increasingly difficult to achieve. And the global digital democracy prophesied by early internet seers remains a distant dream.

Thanks to the Nasdaq plunge, this article's original title, "A sceptic's view of internet euphoria", was no longer contrariant. Now nearly everyone is a sceptic; even the economists who had demonstrated that the productivity surge of recent years had been fuelled largely by the information revolution have fallen back on more modest claims - if largely for the computers and software themselves, not the e-businesses that use them. Thousands of start-up company chief executive officers and employees and even more investors in high technology have bypassed scepticism and gone directly to despair. (I ignore here those who made mega-fortunes and are relatively immune to the tribulations of the majority.) Since the Nasdaq's breathtaking drop, I have spoken at conferences where Croesus-like internet CEOs waxed enthusiastical about information technologies. I was reminded at one event of my fifth-grade class motto, borrowed from Emile Coue, the early 20th-century French psychotherapist and pioneer of auto-suggestion: "Every day in every way, I am becoming better and better." Today, the Coueism "better and better" applies not to the individual but to technology. Many successful CEOs see the demise of start-ups as simply a market adjustment.

Better corporate strategies and profit-making products, combined with untold new technologies, can still simplify everyday living making it "better and better". In many respects, these CEOs - often engineers with brilliant entrepreneurial skills - are correct: the Nasdaq has regained some 12 per cent of its losses, and Silicon Valley engineers are being rehired quickly elsewhere although with diminished dreams of gilded stock-option futures. The technologies are getting better, gifted inventors continue to introduce systems and design innovations, and every day more people worldwide want to get onto the internet.

But the problems are also growing. Even if the market continues to improve, underlying problems merit careful consideration so that the impact of information technologies can be assessed as an ongoing process, not simply in retrospect when the problems are more likely to have become intractable.

The history of the unanticipated consequences of technology has much to teach us. Within the past half-century, an American president and former military general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, eager to explore the positive potential of nuclear power and to dull the memories of its destructive debut in Hiroshima, launched Atoms for Peace. The programme would yield electricity "too cheap to meter". It would also produce enormous amounts of nuclear waste. The search for sites to dispose of this byproduct of success continues to raise the ire of a sceptical public - whether in Egypt, which European countries had hoped to turn into "a nuclear burial ground"; or in England, where opponents chanted "we will not become the nuclear dustbin for the world", or in the United States, where negotiations with Native Americans for the rights to store high-level nuclear wastes in caves on tribal grounds have been going on for 20 years.

The result of not working through unanticipated consequences of new technologies is evident this month as California suffers an acute shortage of electricity - vital to the very industry in Silicon Valley that has spawned much of the recent euphoria. Once the price of oil dropped two decades ago, serious planning for the development of alternative resources was put on the back burner, and the problems of the unintended consequences of nuclear-generated electricity were never resolved. Consequently, inadequate planning for alternative energy resources and conservation has contributed to the problems of the internet industry, a major electric power consumer in California.

The public and the creative minds of the internet should better assess the strengths and limitations of new technologies and develop public policies that enhance the technologies and the lives of the people they have promised to improve.

By squarely facing the downside, we may even avert the sort of impasse brought about by having ignored the dark side of nuclear power.

Dorothy S. Zinberg teaches at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government.