The Moral Geography of the Web

Like anything new, the World Wide Web was greeted by some as a threat to society, our children, and our souls. It's true that everything bad people can do to one another with words and pictures will occur on the web. Old scams, and some we haven't imagined, will be worked. Hatreds old and new will breed like bacteria. Misinformation and disinformation will be passed around as if it came straight from Mt. Sinai.

And yet we should be deeply optimistic about the web. What's good about it is far deeper than the bad that inevitably transpires there, for the web's architecture is the architecture of our better nature. The web is built on the grounds of hope itself.

Forget about technology for the moment. Forget that the web consists of servers, bits, and protocols. Instead, consider it as a new place that we've built for ourselves. It's clearly different from the real world--but what makes it different?

The real world is made of "matter," of stuff you can stub your toe on. The web, on the other hand is made of pages. Pages are the geography of the web, the way mountains, oceans, and deserts are the geography of the real world. Yet pages are profoundly unlike the real world's geography. Mountains, oceans, and deserts are not of human making. They are the brute facts of our lives and our history. Ultimately, they are alien from us, deeply different from us.

Pages, on the other hand, are entirely ours. We write them. We use human language. They exist because someone had something she thought others might be interested in reading, for all the reasons people have for saying things: to amuse, delight, annoy, sell, frighten, trick, touch, confound. The list is as endless as human motivation.

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