Related concerns about the social control are the questions of trust that commonly underlie popular resistance to technology: Will the inevitable corporate control over technological applications sacrifice public or individual interest to the imperatives of private profit?
Information technologies pose three types of problems; they intrude on personal privacy; they offer the means for institutions to control their clients; and they encourage practices that threaten certain democratic values.
Computerized data banks empower bureaucratic authorities by providing easy access to personal information – about credit ratings, school performance, housing, medical histories, and tax status. And in the future, they will no doubt allow access to genetic profiles, providing information about our predisposition to certain diseases or behavioral conditions. Such information may be available to employers, insurers, product advertisers, banks, school systems, university tenure committees, and other institutions that exercise enormous control over our lives. Indeed, given its social impact, computerization could well be called the ‘cursor’ of our time.
Computers will be the means of transmission for pornography in the next quarter-century … Most people don’t recognize that their child can take the home computer and dial up electronic bulletin boards that functionally have the equivalent of an entire adult bookstore online … We need to look at [computer networks] more in terms of a broadcast medium and some of the careful restrictions that go into that to protect children.
The obscenity test is based on community standards, and as our culture continues to decline and standards of morality continue to decline, and as hard-core pornography becomes much more accessible, more and more people see it [and] it’s harder to get prosecutions undertaken … [They don’t] recognize that where prosecutors have been successful in impacting the availability of pornography through obscenity laws, the rape rate drops. The main thing we need to do is protect our children by making parents aware that [cyberporn] is out there. You can no more leave your children alone to travel the information superhighway than you can leave them alone in Times Square in New York City … You’ve got to supervise your children when they’re on a computer system.
Women can take a quantum leap forward now [in the networked age] because no one knows what’s going on. Women always do well at the beginning of a new market, when it’s wide open. Start-ups are generally bought out by bigger companies, and we all know who runs those. My only hope is that consciousness will be raised along the way.
When we as a society are connected through this technology, we will see more woman sharing experience and helping each other break through barriers.
In story after story, deal after deal, the major players are the same white males who already run the leading cable, communications and computer companies. Just where are the women drivers on the information superhighway? Will women be shut out of this lucrative technological revolution, just as they have been shut out of real power and presence in the computer industry? … As the [San Jose] Mercury News noted, “Women are 10 times more likely to be represented on the Supreme Court of the United States than on average board of directors for a company in Silicon Valley” … Some women are well-positioned to speed down the superhighway once it is built.
The superhighway – or hypeway, as one skeptic calls it – is supposed to knit our computer, television and telephones into networks that will allows us to work, shop and run errands in ‘virtual communities’ without ever leaving our armchairs. All this activity is expected to generate a mind-boggling $3.5 trillion global-communications industry by the end of the century, according to no less an expert than John Sculley, the former CEO of Apple Computer. He might add that it could be rocky getting there: He himself left Apple for a job that didn’t pan out.
The sharp-edged technology of the NII can cut a number of ways: It can enlarge the domain of the commodifiers and controllers; it can serve the resistance to these forces; it can saturate us all, controlled and controllers alike, in a virtual alternative to the real world. Meanwhile, most of humanity will live and die deprived of the wonders of the NII, or indeed the joys of adequate nutrition, medical care, and housing. We would do well to regulate our enthusiasms accordingly – that is, to remember where love and mercy have their natural homes, in that same material world. Otherwise we will have built yet another pharaonic monument to wealth, avarice, and indifference. We will have proved the technophobes right. More to the point, we will have collaborated to neglect the suffering of the damned of the earth – our other selves – in order to entertain ourselves.