Lacy Wright – Letter From WashingtonSIX YEARS ago I had never used the Internet or sent an e-mail. Now, it is hard to imagine life without these incredible innovations.
The services now available on the Internet, and the speed with which one can access them, are astonishing. You can pay bills and do your banking on-line, buy or sell almost anything, get your hands on the user's manual for your refrigerator, compare car prices, and perform a great many other chores in a fraction of the time it used to take.
You can do a gamut of other things you never even thought of trying before because they were simply not possible. You can find the phone numbers of people all over the world. Read a host of newspapers (including The Gleaner) without leaving your chair. Listen to many thousands of musical selections, calculate in an instant the monthly interest payments on borrowed money, or customise your screen to display each day the films at all the movie theatres near you, what time they are on, and what the critics have said about them.
And when it comes to pursuing your interests, whether professional or personal, the Internet is a treasure chest of astounding breadth. You can inform yourself on most organisations of any size on earth. Or you can construct your family tree, discover what the World Bank is doing in the countries where it's active, or bookmark an Italian-English dictionary so that, when you're reading the Corriere della Sera on-line and see an unfamiliar word, you can look it up immediately.
What's more, every one of the items above is free as long as you have Internet access, although there are a lot of other services you must pay for if you want them.
And then there's the e-mail, the medium that allows you to communicate almost instantaneously with people no matter the distance. For me, this remains perhaps the Internet's most captivating feature. You can talk over the Internet, too, and very cheaply. A long-distance call to Hong Kong used to be an exotic and costly ordeal. Today, done over the Internet, it is US$0.05 a minute.
The term 'digital divide' has been coined to describe the gulf between those who are at home in this new 'cyber' world and those who aren't. It is taken for granted that people in the first group are, or soon will be, among the world's 'haves,' while those with no Internet access will stay poor.
If that is true, it is worth reporting that I saw scores of 'Internet cafes' in the cities I visited last year in Africa, and they were all full. There, as in Asia, Eastern Europe and Latin America, people who were once isolated are in touch with the world. That has to be a hopeful sign.
Of course, there is a lot of junk, and worse, on the Internet. But we have to make choices every day about what to read, whom to spend our time with, and where to go. It's the same with the Internet. Culling the pearls from the refuse is part of life.
I still run into people mostly in Europe but also in the US who, although they are well-educated and well off, get along without the Internet. Some find it intimidating, and fear the hassle, late in life, of learning how to use it.
Others say they get plenty of information without it. I tell them they are missing out on something tremendous. In fact, I know of no one who has gotten used to the Internet and then abandoned it. Once you start, you're hooked.
Lacy Wright was Deputy Chief of Mission at the US Embassy in Kingston and acted as Ambassador in 1993-1994. He can be reached at LacyWright@cox.net.
