An ethic for the Internet

WRITING with lyrical enthusiasm about the power of wireless, Maurice Gorham recalled how "in the year 1900 there was no such thing as radio broadcasting. The idea that people then living would be able to sit at home and listen to speech and music from all parts of the world, brought to them through the air with no tangible link, was not even present in the minds of scientists. Nobody had any reason to think that the quarter-century would see the childhood, and the half-century the maturity, of a new medium of communication that would cover the inhabited world and become in many countries more powerful, exerting more pressure on the public mind and methods of thought, than pulpit or platform, the theatre or the printed word." Substitute "Internet" for "broadcasting", and this passage, written in 1952, has a decidedly contemporary ring. An insider – he worked at the BBC from 1926 to 1947 – Gorham makes a telling point. The new medium, when it first emerged, appeared to threaten the great institutions of public life: the Church and the university, entertainment and the press. This was because it was a mass medium, capable of "exerting pressure on the public mind and methods of thought". As we face a new millennium, we too do so with what Gorham called "a new medium, a new habit, a new profession and a new industry", namely the Internet. Has Christianity anything to offer the development of an ethic for the Internet? I am convinced that it has, precisely because ours is a Gospel which demands to be transmitted. After his resurrection, Jesus said: "All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptising them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you" (Mt. 28:18-20). Communication is integral to the Gospel; we are a people whose Christian task is proclamation. We are to tell it from the housetops. According to the parable of the sower, we are to broadcast, not to narrowcast. More than that, our baptism is in the name of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. God is known to us as Blessed Trinity. Now this sets up a theological paradigm with serious consequences for our understanding of communications and the mass media. For communication is surely essential to the life of the Godhead. The three Divine Persons are constantly in dialogue. How do we know? Because they demonstrate and show forth the fruits of true communication, namely community. At the heart of our life of faith we proclaim that prayer, our conversation with God and God’s with us, is integral to all that we are and all that we do. We make a virtue of worshipping God through the medium of liturgy. The mass media which most affect us now are television and the Internet. They bring moving pictures into our homes and workplaces. Do they simply bring danger or can they help us be Gospel people and Trinitarian people – that is to say, people who believe in the value of talking to each other and to God? Can the power of the latest medium, the Internet, be subject to an ethic and, if so, what is it? If the fruits of good communication are community, then we have a way of discerning whether a given bit of communication or indeed a given medium of communication works. Which route does the Internet lead us down? Visually gorgeous, seductive because it offers us stills as well as moving images, does it present us with instant temptation as we graze our way down the shelves of virtual supermarkets, fantasise about sex, feed our hypochondria and our anxieties, waste our time and so on? Or is it the most brilliant learning tool imaginable, a resource with which to build human community on an unimaginable scale? It is all too easy to fulminate against the net. We have been here before and must not lose our nerve now. Radio has proved its own merits. We know that it fulfils the brief of Lord Reith, the first director-general of the BBC: it "educates, informs and entertains". It has generated a radio community at world, domestic and local level. It brings companionship to people who live alone. It is becoming increasingly interactive as listeners are invited to build up the dialogue that is radio communication. The fact that it is now a multi-medium, annexing the support of telephone, fax, emails, letters, postcards, phone-ins, proves that it has ably fulfilled the hopes of the early pioneers. So I would go on to say that a Catholic understanding of original sin reminds us that a medium in itself is morally neutral, but that people are not. Bad people put bad material on the net; bad people develop bad habits and search it in unsavoury ways; bad professions abuse it; and the industry itself needs regulating. So let us start in our own hearts and homes. We bear some responsibility for the contents of the net because we are members of the society which it mirrors back to us. Tackle original sin head on, but do not project evil on to a medium which has a unique capacity to build up community, just as radio once did. Sr Lavinia Byrne IBVM teaches communications in the Cambridge Theological Federation.

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