http://chronicle.com/article/The-Internet-Will-Set-You-Free/124126/?sid=wc&utm_source=wc&utm_medium=en
The Internet Will Set You Free
For the 10th-anniversary issue of The Chronicle Review, we asked
scholars and illustrators to answer this question: What will be the
defining idea of the coming decade, and why?
Peter Singer
It doesn't take remarkable insight to suggest that the defining idea
of the coming decade will be the Internet. The Internet's significance
is already apparent, especially in higher education. Everyone now has
access to the resources of the world's greatest libraries.
Collaborating with distant colleagues, and keeping up on the latest
developments in your field, has become much easier. Some scientists
and other scholars now publish their findings online, rather than wait
for a response from a peer-reviewed journal. If you are in the social
sciences, the Internet brings you millions of research subjects.
Similarly, the number of possible students has exploded as more online
courses are offered, and students in developing countries can now take
courses with the world's best teachers from elite universities. The
cost—both financial and environmental—of giving students access to
what they need to read has dropped, as more materials can be read
online or posted on a course Web site. These trends will progress
further; yet they will be among the less significant changes that the
Internet brings about.
Over the next decade, closed cultures will find it increasingly
difficult to keep their members from seeing and contacting people who
live in more open societies. The grip once held by a few media owners
over what reaches the public has been irreversibly loosened by
independent bloggers and reporters who are read by millions. Web sites
like WikiLeaks disseminate leaked documents and cause severe
embarrassment to governments around the world. An Iranian lawyer has
used the Internet to bring international attention to the case of a
woman sentenced to death by stoning for the "crime" of adultery. At
the time of this writing, it appears that the protests have succeeded
in averting the carrying out of the sentence.
The biggest unknown is how far and how fast access to the Internet
will spread. Mobile phones have already proved to be enormously
beneficial for people in developing countries that lack the
infrastructure for landlines. To give just one example, mobile phones
have freed poor rural farmers from dependence on price information
supplied by the merchants who buy their crops. The farmers now have
independent ways of determining market prices. The Internet will make
even greater strides as a tool that empowers the world's poor, but
only if we can find a way to provide cheap and easy Internet access in
developing countries. Will that happen? I hope so. One thing is
certain: We will continue to be surprised at how relatively simple
changes in technology bring about fundamental changes in the way we
live.
Peter Singer is a professor of bioethics at Princeton University.
--
Regards
Fatima Darries
E-LIS SA Editor
www.highedlibrarian.blogspot.com
www.openaccesslibrary.pbwiki.com
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