The Essential Internet:
The Rise of Virtual Culture and the Emergence of
Electric Gaia
     By Michael Strangelove
     Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council
     Doctoral Fellow, University of Ottawa
     Publisher,
     The Internet Business Journal

This essay originally appeared in the September 1994 issue
of Online Access: The Internet Special Issue: Your
Guide to the Information Super Highway, guest edited by
Michael Strangelove. For information regarding this
special issue, contact 70324.343@compuserve.com


At the heart of the Internet phenomenon is not
terabytes and technology, but culture. The Internet is
really about the rise of not merely a new technology,
but a new culture, a global culture where time, space,
boarders, and even personal identity are radically
redefined. In a world obsessed with style and oppressed
by the fear of the other and the alienation of the
self, the Internet represents a return to the
fundamental dynamics of human existence: communication
and community.

What makes the Internet such a powerful catalyst for
change is the almost banal, but nonetheless real,
truism that we are living in the midst of the
Information Age. Everything critical to Western
civilization rests upon information. The creation,
legitimation and propagation of information informs and
directs all structures of modern existence: democracy,
religion, careers, personal identity, even our
sexuality depends upon the flow of information.
Information informs and creates us much in the same way
that DNA orchestrates the structure of life. One
infinitesimally small change to the DNA chain and the
results can be as dramatic as they are unpredictable.
So it is with the Internet. By gradually moving us away
from a paper-based society to an electronic-text based
society, by altering the way information flows and is
accessed, by massive participation in the Internet, the
"Net" stands to have an all encompassing impact on our
socially constructed and information-reliant realities.

What people do on the Internet, above all else, is
communicate. They exchange e-mail. They talk to each
other. They do the low ASCII dance. The result of this
exchange is an emerging Internet culture: a distinct
social phenomenon with identifiable members, heroes and
villains, rules, metaphors, values, shared history and
growing subcultures. One of the more prominent Internet
subcultures is the cyberpunk movement -- the spiritual
heirs of the flower child generation who challenge the
present on its own terms: information and the right to
freely access and share it among all peoples. It is a
beautiful twist of fate that the youth of the nineties
have named information as the key issue and see the
computer networks as the new battle ground for the
struggle to maintain democratic freedoms.

One of the earliest and most active users of computer
networks is the Native American community. A people
with a strong sense of community which have been
marginalized by society have found that the Internet is
a means to maintain a distinct identity and foster
community across vast distances. This should stand as
an indication of what the Internet is all about: not
high tech and hot machines, but communication,
community, and identity.

Until roughly three years ago, Internet culture was
largely rooted in the scientific, academic, military
and technical realms of the Western nations. But the
vast majority of Internet growth has occurred in the
past two years, resulting in an explosion of a great
diversity of user groups. Today, the commercial world
constitutes over 50% of the Internet and is the fastest
growing part of the Net. The research, government,
educational and defense community make up the remaining
50% of the Internet community. All this means that the
Internet is both a catalyst for change while at the
same time undergoing enormous transformation itself.

We can speak of the Internet as being in the process of
becoming both the ultimate tool of "Big Brother" and
the new hope of the dispossessed. We can be certain
that like the printing press, the Net will be used to
inform democratic action and politize a fragmented and
disempowered population. It will most certainly also be
used to manipulate the consumer and assist the giant
engines of dehumanizing beauracracy and big government.
As with the introduction of television and the rise of
mass culture, we stand ignorant before the uncertain
future of the massive forces presently at work.

Only a few decades after the invention of the Gutenberg
Press, there were fifty million books in Europe. The
result of this, for better and worse, was the Age of
Enlightenment and the rise of modern civilization.
Unlike the coming interactive cable TV systems, which
may only allow us to interact with our wallets and 500
channels of shit on TV, the Internet represents not
simply a new era of entertainment, but a new era of
communication and self publication. The era of
electronic pamphleteers has quietly begun.

With a computer, modem and an Internet connection,
every person has the potential to become a publisher, a
mass distributor of knowledge, information and
misinformation, fact, fancy and fiction. Never before
in history have so many people been able to communicate
so much to so many. The ability to communicate to mass
audiences has been the privilege of the elite -- now it
is within the grasp of the person on the street. How
governments and international corporations will attempt
to control this new power is uncertain, but such power
and freedom will certainly not escape the attention of
those "in control" for long. For now at least, the
Internet is the largest uncensored medium of
communication in history, and may indeed become the
last stand for free speech -- an otherwise historically
rare phenomenon.

Within the Internet a convergence is taking place that
will shake the foundations of the powerful. Free-Nets,
community telecomputing networks that provide urban
areas with free Internet e-mail accounts and access to
government information, are spreading across North
America. Before this millennium comes to a close, most
major urban areas in North America will be connected
through a global web of Free-Nets. These Free-Nets will
provide a new generation with their first experience of
e-mail and the Internet.

At the same time, state after state is beginning to
offer free Internet accounts to students and teachers.
Where I was taught to use a slide-rule, my children
will play and learn in the fields of the Internet. What
will happen when the Free-Net population erupts onto a
diverse and matured Internet culture is certain to be
as dramatic and far reaching as the invention of mass
printing. The dawn of the next century will reveal a
truly networked nation of citizens demanding greater
access to government information, elected officials,
and corporate decision makers. The convergence of the
children of silicon valley with the emergence of
Free-Nets and the larger Internet will redefine our
concept and experience of community, reshape our
relationship to information, see the triumph of content
over style, and forever change our perception of self,
time, space, and the Other in much the same way as
seeing the earth from outer space has irreversibly
changed the modern mind.

We are at one and the same time the children of Mother
Earth and the midwives of Electric Gaia. Our children
are destined to participate in a new form of global
consciousness that is the birthright of a people who
are in the process of defining themselves as one
community on one planet. Behind the technology, behind
the hidden dangers, behind tomorrow is this -- the
essential Internet.

Michael Strangelove (Mstrange@Fonorola.Net or 613-747-
6106) is the founder of Strangelove Internet
Enterprises, an  entreperneurial company that publishes
The Internet Business Journal and How to Advertise on
the Internet: An Introduction to Internet-Facilitated
Marketing.
