Is It Time For A Digital Revolution?

I remember when the internet first came out. Yes. I'm that old. I remember hearing the tuneless, soulless beeps of a dial-up modem for the first time and being excited, then hearing it connect.

That's it! I'm online. Now what?

It was sold as a wonderful thing, as if every encyclopaedia ever was suddenly at your fingertips. It was initially underwhelming,if you had no reason to be online you would just twiddle your thumbs randomly looking for things, but not with Google because Google was not a thing yet. You would Ask Jeeves or more likely Lycos because you liked dogs and that was their logo. It was a new way of connecting to people. Oh how I loved the now defunct Microsoft messenger. It was wondrous. Instant chat with friends in an age where many of us had only just stopped using rotary phones.

We believed thee future was amazing, we had the knowledge and the power. With all the information surely the only way for the human race is up?

And yet here we are twenty years on. In a time where no-one is sure whether Russian bots interfered with the US and Brexit elections. A time where, if we're honest, noone is even sure what a Russian bot is (I like to think of it as a transformer with a big fluffy hat on, or R2D2 with a succession of smaller R2D2s hidden inside).

It's a time where vaccination rates have lowered because people believe tweets by actors hold more medical weight than academic papers by actual doctors. The country is seeing measles outbreaks because an echo chamber of mums on Facebook is telling other worried mums that they'll give their child autism if a needle goes within twelve feet of them. The troubling thing is people believe these strangers on the Internet because what they say is in text, on a screen, on the Web. So it must be true.

Except it isn't.

Vaccinate your sodding children.

Then there's the much darker things, children being bullied or groomed online being the most worrying for me (a concerned but sensibly pro-vaccination parent). I'm terrified for my children. They're growing up with dangers that were inconceivable for me as a child. Even in their safe spaces at home bullying can happen. They can be bullied intercontinentally. We have to teach them that people online might not be who they say they are, there's bad people out there so question everything. Admittedly not a bad lesson to teach our young but still, home should be safe, a respite, not somewhere else fraught with dangers.

I don't think anyone foresaw the monster the internet would become , a terrible propaganda tool, a damaging element and it's terrifying and we're all discovering this new ground together. We're all seeing how dangerous it is at the same time, be it unexpected arguably wholly unsuitable Electoral results, the reemergence of previously almost eradicated diseases, or online grooming of our young children.

Why did noone make a big red off switch?