If you seek to write about new media and technology with perspective and detachment, rather than mindless enthusiasm, you quickly find yourself in a tight spot.
Since political pronouncements about, and mass media coverage of, digital culture and new technologies are often phobic and dumb, you are quickly forced into a position of continuous defense. The extreme and continuous attacks on Web culture have the odd effect of focusing on problems that are so wildly exaggerated that real problems are barely noticed or talked about.
No, there are not perverts and pornographers lurking on every Web site. No, your kid isn't likely to become a drug addict, social outcast, or militia member if he or she ventures online. No, abduction isn't a commonplace digital occurrence.
Given the extremely distorted portrayal of the Net, a critic, despite best intentions, drifts toward cheerleading as journalistic instincts seek to "balance" all the criticism of the Net and the Web. Instead of criticizing, critics end up defending, a distortion of the very notion of criticism.
It's a silly and awkward position to be in, because there's lots about Net culture to worry about - online hostility, corporatization, elitism, and arrogance. But when The New York Times on its front page brands the Internet as a hive of illegal drug activity, it seems almost disloyal to raise real worries and concerns.
Still, every month or so I receive a cautionary tale, usually from somebody who has been online for a while and appreciates it, but has had a frightening or wounding experience on the Net. It's hard to know what to make of some of these emailed sagas, or to know how typical or significant they are. Some people are brutally and cruelly assaulted - flamed - for speaking their minds, for being female, or for making mistakes. Others spend more money than they should on equipment and phone bills.
Others wrestle with the intense emotional and personal connections that arise in a culture where dear friends may never have even met.
These stories are haunting, much more so than all the clucking and shrieking about pornography done by journalists and politicians.
They ought to be shared, for whatever they're worth, because the people suffering them want other people to know what they're going through, and because they remind us that any technology or innovation has a dark side, creates victims as well as beneficiaries, and costs somebody something.
So here are some excerpts from one cautionary tale. It varies in detail, but is otherwise similar to perhaps 50 I've received over the past six months.
This comes from a schoolteacher in her 30s, a mother, wife, and webhead who lives in the Northeast, has a 9-year-old daughter and a son, 7. She is articulate and intelligent, and an enthusiastic advocate of the Net both as an educational and community tool. She had emailed me numerous times about her efforts to keep her school library from employing blocking software because some kids were accessing sexual imagery. She sparked a successful counterattack on her local school board, and the locals backed down.
So she wrote me as someone who was an online friend, a person I knew to be grounded and thoughtful.
"I love the Internet. But there are people online who use the Internet poorly, and both abuse it and are abused by it."
She has been married for 10 years, quite happily, she says.
From her posts:
"I'm living a kind of cyber-nightmare. I honestly don't know what to do about it. My husband met someone online and fell deeply in love with her. He spent between four and eight hours a night on the computer. He didn't sleep and was exhausted, furtive, and irritable. For a long time, he wouldn't explain what he was doing there, but it quickly became obvious. His work began to slip. He ignored the kids, not to mention me, and our phone bills were astronomical. He lied to his friends, to me, to the kids about what he was doing.
"Eventually, I went to a friend's house and went online and found him in a chat room. I knew his online ID name, plus it was clear from what he was saying who he was. They were even, at one point, talking about me, and how to hide this from me.
"He still denied everything. Then he finally broke down and admitted he was in love with this person and had become addicted to this relationship. Believe me, this is a sensible man who's never caused anyone in his life any harm. Or done anything that was irresponsible. He would claim he'd stopped, but couldn't. After months of this, I asked him to leave the house, and he did. I wanted to force the issue while we still had a chance. He has asked to go into counseling with me, and we're going to try and put it together. I don't know if we can.
"There was some sort of ironic justice at work here, I thought in my most paranoid moments. I'm a geek, a Net advocate, and an enthusiastic webhead. At every school gathering or neighborhood picnic, I'm the one telling the other moms and parents not to worry about the Net, not to listen to the people trying to frighten them and censor the culture. I'm in an online teachers' group, which has been invaluable to my work and through which I've made many friends.
"When I was at wit's end, I posted some details of this story to my online group. I heard story after story like this, people who became addicted to games, relationships, other things online.
"I'm writing you this not to portray the Net as a dangerous place, but to point out that there are people who can get hooked in unhealthy ways, and who end up using technology for the wrong purposes. It's not drugs or smut on a Web site that I'm telling you about, but I'm writing because I believe there is an issue that involves inappropriate use of technology by individuals who are obviously already troubled, and I'm also increasingly concerned as I hear these stories about companies who push new technologies on people who are not prepared to use them. I just thought you ought to hear this. There's so much gee-whizzing about what you can do online that some people lose track of what it is that they're doing."
She sent me her husband's email address, and I emailed him about her story. He emailed back that he didn't want to discuss it, other than to say it was essentially true, that he was seeking help, that he had come to realize that he had an "addictive" problem.
She told me that her perception was that her husband, not the Internet, was to blame. That he had lost track of what he was doing, and was sucked in by what she says is the fact that this new technology promised more in emotional terms than it could deliver.
When the teacher asked me what I thought, I said it seemed to me that her husband had problems, and that it was likely they would have surfaced in one way or another, Internet or no Internet. This would be a familiar kind of story at almost any point in human history, although it could never have unfolded in quite this way.
But it also seemed to me that Net culture, personal and addictive as it can be, probably made things a lot worse for her family, perhaps a lot more quickly than might have happened otherwise. Adults, especially, have to take responsibility for and live with the consequences of what they do, and get help when they need it. Blaming the Internet isn't going to patch any marriage back together.
But there are lots of people out there in the ether with painful stories to tell, and this should be noted, even in our luddite time when fears about the Internet are approaching a national hysteria.
This article appeared originally in HotWired.
