NEARLY a decade ago, I still remember, I had stepped into an Internet café here in Riyadh, which, during the first days of Internet service in the Kingdom, was crowded with surfers flocking to try out the new revolutionary advent. The net administrator at the café was smiling as he led me into a U-shaped compartment that had a medium-sized computer monitor with its flashy screen. With a mouse click, I was online with the Yahoo home page popping up in front of me. Briskly, the café administrator erased the web history files from the browser so as not to look at what the previous customer was doing before me. Because of my humble knowledge of Internet at that time, I could not understand what he had done. The Internet connection was frustratingly slow taking several minutes for a text-and-image page to download. The service was costly, too. An hour would cost double or may be triple of what it costs now. I was amazed at the limitless capabilities of the World Wide Web. Today many things can be done online. You can communicate instantly with friends, some whom you know and some you never met before. You can buy a book, pay for electricity bills, book a hotel room, seek an admission in a foreign academic institution, to name a few. You can further be blackmailed, your email hacked and your personal information stolen. The Internet has revolutionized nearly everything in our lives. Currently all newspapers in the Kingdom have gone online. Emerging individual news websites and blogs are gaining popularity and are becoming the focus of surfers' attention. Ministries, universities, banks and numerous other local agencies all have their own websites which contain information and offer online services to the public. Job seekers can fill in an employment application and send it online without leaving home. Doctors, teachers and businesspeople are using the Internet in their clinics, classrooms and business centres, much the same as their rivals do almost everywhere. The Internet has undoubtedly increased social equality despite the terrible digital divide that affects countries of the third world. It has enabled the voiceless to voice his or her concerns, aspirations and hopes using a state-of-art means of mass media that has been never available but to the elites who, particularly during the pre-Internet era, could control which issues to be publicly addressed and which ones not to be left. A totally new information tool is now emerging leaving the whole world puzzled about the extent of this revolutionary tool that enables all people from different geographical, religious and cultural backgrounds to communicate freely and cheaply without difficulties or barriers. The shift from predominantly traditional mass media toward the Internet-generated outlets has also opened the door wide for a whole new user-generated content. Wikis, aggregators, podcasting and blogs are all examples of the participatory aspect of the Internet where people cannot only be receiving content but generating it as well. Mainstream media has to cope with this reality and many of them have decided to offer users a chance to blog their opinions, post their comments and add content that is no less readable than the one put by the media's professional contributors. Such consumer-generated content has become phenomenal. Academics, politicians and specialists have realized the crucially important role played by the new trend. Barack Obama is now broadcasting his speeches not from a famous cable news network but rather through a video-sharing website where users, all users, can upload their videos and share them with millions of viewers worldwide. The change that the Internet has brought to our life is, I believe, comparable to those of the major ground-breaking inventions that have changed people's life forever. The only difference between the rise of the Internet as a life-changing means of communication and any other traditional invention is that the former has spread so quickly and dramatically whereas the latter may take some time to get into use in the rest of the world. However, the Internet has also brought with it huge cultural, economic and technological challenges to the people. It poses a discernible challenge particularly in these time where the local cultures of the smaller communities are seriously threatened. For some people, the Internet culture reflects the dominant culture of the ones who control it. The English language, for example, is said to be the Internet language with other world's languages becoming less used and consumed. The divide in the content is worrisome with millions of webpages written in one language, namely English, and reflects a specific culture of the people who speak it. The Internet is full of good and evil, great and garbage all in one place. But despite all negative aspects that are true to the Internet, the reality says that the Internet has become an integral part of everyday life and that it would occupy this status maybe for years to come. – SG – The author can be reached at [email protected] __
