Who’s afraid of the big, bad WEB?

It used to annoy me back in 1998, so you may be able to imagine my frustration that the internet (and particularly the web) is still seen as inherently EVIL.

Back in those heady days, the web was evil because as many potential terrorists as you could fit in a training camp could simply ‘log on’ (don’t get me started on that one!) to the internet and find out how to make a nuclear bomb. Of course, those same potential terrorists could have gone to any decent library and found out the same information.

It was simply a case of bashing the new technology because in good, old fashioned luddite style, we fear change.

It also seems that old habits die hard.

Last week in EastEnders we had a situation in which a teenage boy was seen by his mum to be spending a lot of time on his laptop “on the internet”. His mum voiced her concerns to the local IT boffin (not someone who actually works in IT or web design or anything, you understand, merely someone who was young enough not to be a torch-bearing yokel on his way to burn something).

Could it be her son was in chat rooms being groomed by paedophiles? Or perhaps he was gay and meeting other gay men? (of course, the idea that this is something you may not want your offspring doing is questionable in the extreme, but then the BBC does have an obligation to raise these issues). “Nah”, said Bradley (the resident IT expert). “He’s a teenage boy, spending a lot of time on the net. Gotta be porn.”

Genius.

And I suppose that Bradley (or the scriptwriter) has never heard of Second Life or facebook? YouTube? Webmail? Even the BBC web site (which one could happily peruse for millennia)? Or indeed its magnificent iPlayer?

No. It had to be something negative.

One day it would be nice to think that when the word ‘internet’ is used that people won’t automatically picture the denizens of hell tapping away on keyboards to pervert society by any means possible.