Most Americans are in the thrall of some cult or pathology or hobby. Or don't have any friends because they live in some ten-minute-old suburb in the middle of a cornfield or desert and spend all their spare time commuting and watching TV and looking at catalogues. Highways made the suburbs happen. The suburbs will make your World Wide Web happen - From Kurt Andersen's novel Turn of the Century
Hailed as a defining novel of the decade, this book is at its most astute in capturing the spirit of the 1990s when it comes to technology. Again and again it claims that the success of the Web and the Net depend on having first a fragmented and dysfunctional society.
In a year in which US senators sought a debate on "the decline in America's culture" and one shooting outrage followed another, from Columbine High School to Honolulu, it would appear that some decision makers in that country take seriously the idea that social decay and the rise of the Net are linked. If so, does it follow that Ireland and other countries will follow the same pattern?
When this point is put to Fred Crowe, chairman of the Irish Internet Association, his first reaction is "I've never thought about it like that". He continues: "The Internet is many things to many people. It's like the phone service - you can use it for chatlines or for phoning your mother. It covers all ends of the spectrum, it's different things to different people."
Ireland is not necessarily repeating the US pattern, he says. A number of factors are coming together to create the situation for the Internet to flourish. "The world is becoming a smaller place," he says. "The Internet is part of that moving away from the idea of a nation state, which is only about 150 years old, back to international economies. The Internet is part of a whole digital revolution that has come along at the right time."
Are we being fatalistic about the digital revolution, though, and failing to question the changes it brings? According to Professor James Wickham, lecturer in European labour market studies at TCD, "social changes are not caused by these developments, but they are exacerbating social inequalities".
"The interesting thing about it is that at the moment the explosion of Internet and related technologies is tied up with the explosion of Reaganite-Thatcherite deregulation. What that means is a great commercialisation and monetarisation of all social relationships, an erosion of trust and the changing of the personal and market relationship the logical completion of which is the isolated individual consumer."
At the same time, he says, "The Internet has all these counter-culture nooks and crannies deliberately making things non-commercial. At the moment we are looking a the trend of developing the market but there are counter tendencies . . . In Ireland I would argue that we are swallowing hook, line and sinker the American line on this issue".
He suggests looking at other European countries, where "they are looking at the information society and tackling questions of how information society citizenship doesn't create new forms of social exclusion. In Ireland we don't do this".
In pursuit of profit we are losing an opportunity to fully utilise the new technologies, he believes. "In Ireland we understand all of this in terms of e-commerce and money for Ireland plc." It seems like a very Irish solution to a very international problem.
noelgallagher@tinet.ie