2014: the year the internet finally came of age

By John Naughton,

The best we can say about 2014 is that it was the year when we finally began to have a glimmer of what the internet might mean for society. Not the internet that we fantasised about in the early years, but the network as it has evolved from an exotic curiosity into the mundane underpinning of our lives – a general-purpose technologyor GPT.

And, in a way, the timescale is about right. The internet that we use today was switched on in January 1983, but it didn't really become a mainstream medium until the web began to explode in 1993. So we're about 21 years into the revolution. And what we know from the history of other GPTs is that it generally takes at least two decades before they form the unremarked-upon backdrops to everyday life.

In 1999, Andy Grove, then the CEO of Intel, the dominant chip-maker of the time, made a famous prediction. In five years' time, he said, “companies that aren't internet companies won't be companies at all”. He was widely ridiculed for this pronouncement at the time. But in fact he was just being prescient. What he was trying to communicate was that the internet would one day become like the telephone or mains electricity – something that we take for granted. Grove's point was that companies that boasted that they “were now on the internet” in 2004 would already be regarded as ridiculous. And so indeed they were.

The novelist Andrew O'Hagan had a lovely contrarian piece in the New York Timeslast month – contrarian because it usefully runs counter to the golden-age, hand-wringing lamentation that ubiquitous networking evokes in many of us. “Yesterday morning,” he writes, I realised I needed to know something about a distant relative for a book I'm writing. I'm old enough to remember when one had to pack a bag and take a train; when one had to stand in queues at libraries, complete an application form, then scroll for hours through hard-to-read microfiche and take notes and repeat. I'm not 104, but I wrote a whole book that way, my first, and it took for ever and it didn't add much to most of the paragraphs. Yesterday, I had the information from an archive website in about 20 minutes.”

And then? “I ordered a car from Uber to take me to King's College London to teach a class, and I emailed my notes to my office computer from the car and I dealt with a dozen emails and I read a review of a restaurant I was going to that evening and watched part of a video of a ballet I was due to see before dinner.”

Even those of us who lead less exotic lives could tell similar stories: of holidays and flights booked from an armchair; of ebooks delivered in less than a minute; of emails received from the other side of the planet; of photographs and movies instantly shared with friends; of Christmas shopping done online; of groceries ordered from Tesco – and delivered to an elderly parent who lives on her own 200 miles away; of seeing family members in Australia via Skype or FaceTime; of being able to find information on Wikipedia or help with calculus from the Khan Academy (motto: “You only have to know one thing: you can learn anything”). And so on, ad infinitum.

Could we live without the net? Answer: on an individual level possibly, but on a societal level no – simply because so many of the services on which industrialised societies depend now rely on internet connectivity. In that sense, the network has become the nervous system of the planet. This is why it now makes no more sense to argue about whether the internet is good or bad than to debate whether oxygen or water are desirable. We've got it and we're stuck with it.

Which means that we're also stuck with its downsides. While offline crime has decreased dramatically – car-related theft has reduced by 79% since 1995 and burglary by 67%, for example, what's happened is that much serious crime has now moved online, where its scale is staggering, even if the official statistics do not count it. The same goes for industrial espionage (at which the Chinese are currently the world champions) and counter-espionage and counter-terrorism (at which the NSA and GCHQ currently top the international league tables). And we're just getting started on cyberwarfare.

So here we are at the end of 2014, finally wising up to what we've got ourselves into: an internet that provides us with much that we love and value and would be hard put to do without. But an internet that is also dangerous, untrustworthy and comprehensively monitored. The question for 2015 and beyond is whether we can have more of the former and less of the latter. Happy New Year!