Dialogue: That flight to the e-future could well be a big non-e-vent

By JOE BENNETT

People tell me that the Internet will change the world. Tomorrow will be different, they tell me. The plane is leaving now. Scramble, fight and claw your way aboard, for though nobody knows quite where the plane is going, they know that it will be better and different from the here and now and if you do not board it, you will be left on a barren strand and you will be left lamenting. Grab a bag of dotcoms and come for the ride.

The Internet has made several people comically rich. But Bill Gates and his fellow squidzillionaires are not the people who use the Internet. They are the people who enable other people to use it. They write the software, print the chips, manufacture the widgets. They are the navvies who have laboured to build the Information Highway.

Those who use the highway, the founders of the dotcom companies, have not done quite so well. Few of their companies are much cop. Few have made much profit. Their owners may have become millionaires but their castles are built on sand and could collapse tomorrow. For their millions come from people like you and me who are frightened of missing the plane to the future, so we have bought shares in the dotcoms.

We believe that though they may not be changing the world just yet, they soon will do so. Or failing that, we believe that other people will believe that they will do so, and will be willing to pay more for shares in those companies than we have paid and so we will make a profit out of a company that doesn't make a profit.

It is called belief. And belief can come a cropper. In recent weeks it has come a bit of a cropper. Further croppers would not surprise me.

The vision of the future that underpins this belief is a wide world of e-commerce, e-business, e-everything. They call it the new economy. Well, the new economy sounds drastic, but a new economy is bound to resemble an old economy. For any economy consists of nothing more than buyers and sellers. The seller offers a service or an artifact and the buyer buys it.

The Internet is simply a new medium through which business can be done. The Internet is already a shopping mall. From the computer on which I write this, I can buy a book or a bath or a ballpoint pen. I can also do all those things in the High St I can see from my window. The Internet simply offers me mail-order shopping. We have had mail-order shopping for 100 years. Most people don't use it.

Will the Internet kill the shops? Will our streets empty of everyone except an army of delivery people bringing the goods to our doors? Will we all live in a fortress called home, wired permanently into contact with anyone and everything that we shall need, making cyberlove on line, joining chat rooms, performing endless virtual replicas of the activities that now fill our busy, grubby, unsatisfactory days?

Will we all work from home, avoiding all the tedium of commuting and office politics and yo-ho-ho behind the photocopier and sneaking an extended lunch-hour and hoodwinking the boss?

The answer, I suspect, to all these questions is "no."

For although the Internet is a welcome new means of communication, I do not think it much more revolutionary than the telephone. It will ease commerce between businesses and businesses, and between businesses and customers, but it will alter neither the nature of business nor the stuff of our lives.

For lives are about people. We are social and emotional beasts. If any one of us looks back over our lives, over that unique accumulation of peaks and troughs that forms a landscape only we can recognise, we will see that the peaks and the troughs and all the prominent landmarks are to do with people.

For sure, the Internet will be a useful tool offering new ways of doing some of the things that human beings have always done. But it will not revolutionise our lives.

Some people fear the Internet because they do not understand it. Others fear that they are being left behind. But their fears are groundless. They will find that the plane to the future will rise into the air, describe a wide exciting arc and then return to Earth not so very far from where it started.