Ed Henning

It is all too often that a technology gets the blame for the way people use it. In the recent case of the young girl who ran off with an American ex-soldier, some of the comments I heard or read seemed to suggest that it was the fault of the internet.

I have, in the past, been inclined not to comment on such cases, because the end result has been tragic. But thankfully in this case she returned home unharmed.

We were told that this girl had her internet access limited - yes, limited - to five hours a day, and that unsupervised she would stay on for up to 11 hours a day.

I cannot understand why I have not seen a word of criticism of her parents. What kind of people can they be? Slumped in front of Big Brother all day long is the kindest guess.

These people seriously need to get a life and have their computers, and probably their television, confiscated.

Around the same time there were reports of the Thai authorities closing down internet cafes in the small hours of the morning because of young kids obsessed with some Korean online game. Again, where are the parents of these kids when they are out on the town in the small hours?

My dilemma in all this is that obsession can be a very creative state, and there is a thin dividing line between single-minded determination and dangerous obsession.

Many teenagers have become quite rich from computer games they have written in their homes, struggling through endless hours, determined to make the thing work.

The technology is more complex now, making this more difficult, but such obsession drives much good programming, and you don't have to be a teenager.

I have experienced this many times myself, when a particular programming problem, usually self-created, has kept me at the machine until three or four in the morning, sometimes getting me out of bed to turn on the PC when ideas and possible solutions have been keeping me awake.

It can be annoying, but it works, and there is something about PCs - I am sure it is their interactive nature - that makes them particularly prone to this.

I once asked an IBM developer why it was that compilers worked best in the early hours of the morning, and he replied sensibly: "That's when they were written."

But it is not only modern technology that inspires this kind of obsession. One of my favourite stories of obsession or single-mindedness concerns Einstein when he needed a paperclip, and the only one he could find was bent.

So he tried to find something to use to straighten it, found a brand new paperclip, and then proceeded to bend this into the shape of a suitable tool with which to straighten the original paperclip. A very thin dividing line, indeed.

Thinking about this reminded me of a book I read about three years ago and, if you are interested in the internet and attitudes towards modern technology, then I strongly recommend it.

The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage is the story of the invention and early development of the telegraph, another interactive technology.

The book highlights a few interesting comparisons with the internet. The first is that the impact on communications was much greater with the telegraph.

It is easy to forget how isolated different countries were before the telegraph, when the fastest way of sending information was usually by ship, and it would take weeks. Think of reporting on, or directing, a war on another continent with communications like that.

Within a few years, the telegraph effectively shrank the world when it made long distance communications possible within minutes, relaying messages from one station to the next.

Sure, things like email have made communications cheaper and more convenient, but it does not compare to the huge leap forward with the telegraph.

As now, so then, and it appears that people thought the telegraph was a means of solving the world's problems.

Thankfully, most of those internet evangelists that made so much noise a few years ago have gone quiet. Or maybe we have just become immune to their ranting.

According to Standage, because the telegraph had such a profound effect, people extrapolated this into thinking it would "eliminate the drudgery of manual work and create a world of abundance and peace".

Substitute modern ideas and language for the Victorian, and it could be a Negraponti or Dyson speaking.

Just like the internet, the telegraph was another tool that made certain tasks easier and enabled a few new ones. That's all.

There was then no equivalent to the chat rooms of the modern internet, but people played games over the telegraph, governments tried vainly to regulate it, and people used it for crime, found love and even got married by means of Morse code messages.

All of this shows that we have been 'here' before, actually 100 years ago, but seem to have forgotten the lessons we learned.

Hence we've lost our perspective when dealing with some of the serious issues raised by the mishandling of technologies like the internet. When something bad happens, we should really blame ourselves (or maybe our parents) instead.

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