From Internet-on-a-Disk #9, Feb. 1995.
We see today -- while it is still in its early stages -- that the Internet enables new behavior and new ways for people to interrelate. If we are indeed products of our environment, will this new environment shape us in new ways? Might human nature "progress"?Personally, I doubt that our basic human nature is "perfectible." Rather, I believe that the human potential for good and ill, for creativity, for reason, and for random senseless violence remains relatively constant over the centuries. But there are aspects of human nature which may never have been exercised before because there never before existed the technical means for their expression.
In other words, the human potential for the exercise of mass destruction existed before the invention of the weapons that made it possible. The potential for people to temporarily submerge their identity and their individual reason in large-scale crowd hysteria existed before the invention of mass communication media. And the potential for large-scale reasoned discourse, for thousands or even millions of people to arrive at mutual understanding and consensus through dialogue existed before there was any means to allow ideas to be spread instantaneously in a global forum where they could compete on the basis of their merit.
I contend that the Internet today reveals positive aspects of human nature, and in particular the nature of people working together as a unit on a global scale, that we have never seen before. It isn't likely to change the nature of man; rather it allows us to express aspects of our potential which previously were hidden from us.
Before the coming of the Internet, the only image we had of large numbers of people working together was the image of the crowd and the crowd-like mass hysteria that can be induced by modern one-way mass communication, where one person's nightmare becomes projected onto the many and becomes their nightmare as well.
We had come to presume -- from the examples of history and the writings of novelists and philosophers --- that an individual in isolation -- Thoreau alone on a hillside -- is more likely to be good and rational than any large group of people. People together become a crowd, enforce conformity, and sometimes become an unreasoning mob that acts out wild unconscious impulses that the isolated individual could have kept under control. We see the boys in Golding's Lord of the Flies working themselves into a savage frenzy, and we are dramatically led to recognize the beast which is in us all.
As Robert Penn Warren once said, "Things exist in you without you
knowing it." But those unknown "things" may be good as well as
evil. And today the culture of the Internet reveals vast and
unexpected human potential for unselfish collaboration.