THE EXCLUSIVE NEWS ZONE

The case of the Cabinet minister's son underlines inequalities in the
information era, says ALAN TAYLOR

IT BEGAN with the wheel and it may yet end with the Internet. Like a pair
of distressed denims, the world is shrinking. Distance and national borders
are no longer barriers; time zones nowadays are more quaint than
meaningful. When you can circumnavigate the globe in less than a day
communication, increasingly, occurs in a blur.

Long gone are the days when the Post Office was the sole means of getting a
message from one corner of the planet to another. E-mail and the Internet
make the notion of sending a letter seem strange and no more efficient than
carving out what you want to say on tablet of stone. Soon, I suspect,
Postman Pat and his black and white cat will be seeking early retirement if
they haven't already. Like wheelwrights, whelksellers, and town criers,
they are anachronisms, denizens of a more sedate and somnolent era.

For this is the true age of information. As the row burbles on over the
affair of the anonymous minister of state and his teenage son accused of
selling cannabis to an undercover journalist, the Internet is a hive of
gossip. Those with access to it know who the minister is, as does everyone
in the media and politics. Yet everywhere I go people want to know who he
is. When I tell them, they are not surprised, just slightly miffed that
they are being kept in the dark. Why is this? they ask, when even the
minister himself accepts that his name must inevitably emerge sooner rather
than later. When I explain that it's for a combination of legal reasons and
diplomatic protocol, they look bemused. If you know, they say, surely we
should know too.

It is hard to deny their logic. Log on to the Internet, I tell them, and
enlightenment will be yours. But they don't have access to the Internet.
They get their news from the papers, and from radio and television, all of
which seem at present to be written in code. News consumers are not used to
such subtlety. They are used to headlines telling them boldly what's what;
reading between the nuances is for literary critics and conspiracy
theorists. Ordinary people want to be told straight what's going on. Above
all, they don't want to feel excluded.

But they are and it irritates them, understandably so. When the mantra is
"Information is power", not to have access to it is a form of impotence.
You are emotionally, intellectually and democratically deprived. Thus is
created a society of information haves and have-nots and the gulf is
widening daily.

In reality, very few people - about 5 per cent of the population, and the
majority of them middle-class - have Internet access, many of them at their
place of work. They are the information elite. Those without access are
impoverished and frustrated.

This is just one of the issues thrown up by this peculiar case but it is
one of the more intriguing and important ones. Many people still ignorantly
insist on seeing the Internet as a great railway station in the ether where
anoraks gather at the end of a cyber platform. But it is much more
significant than that. For many people it is a means of earning their daily
crust. For far-flung journalists, for instance, it is like having the
National Library at your beck and call 24 hours a day. In essence, it is a
vast, undisciplined, unregulated, disorganised research resource, an
overflowing river in which sewage and cutting-edge information are swept
along together.

Those familiar with it know how to find their way around and have learned
to by-pass the rubbish. They have learned, too, that in the jungle of the
Internet it is possible to unearth information that in the days of old
printed technology would never have been published. The reasons for this
are legion - libel, contempt, blackmail, national security, personal
distress, you name it - but the Internet can evade them all. Like the Wild
West, it is a place where outlaws can roam at will beyond clutches of the
law.

Many find this liberating and exhilarating. At last technology has
triumphed over those who would put checks and balances in the way of
everyone getting hold of information. For information providers, the
Internet is much cheaper and more convenient than conventional modes of
communication. It is also ecologically correct.

You do not need to chop down trees to tell everyone that Hearts have thrown
Hibs a lifeline or that Helen Mirren is not related to the Paisley saint.

The Internet is faster than newspapers, faster even than television and
radio. It has no truck with censors. Governments cannot cope with it
because you cannot touch it or feel it. It is ungovernable and anarchic -
anyone can become an information provider, as anyone who has the equipment
can surf its oceans - and it is for this reason that it is proving so
difficult to regulate, whether it be for child pornography or to protect a
senior member of the Cabinet. Whether it ever will be tamed is a moot
point; whether we want it to be is even more pertinent.

Certainly, the Net is an opportunity for society's misfits and malcontents
to spread their ill-will and malign messages. But as with television after
the watershed, there comes a point when adults must take charge of their
children's behaviour and responsibility for their own habits. The Internet
creates dilemmas that until now have been for individuals to resolve. But
the more sophisticated it becomes, the more diverse are the opportunities
for those who would like to use it for subversive activities.

It seems to me that the Internet is heading towards a crossroads. Like the
British press it will continue to thrive if those such as Bill Gates with a
vested interest in its future will help find a means towards some form of
self-regulation. If they are successful, governments may be inclined to
leave well alone. If they are not, they open themselves to unacceptable
levels of outside interference which would be anathema to Internet
aficionados who rejoice in its unfettered cultural ethos. That way lies the
death of the Internet. But that, surely, is inconceivable.

It is far too powerful and useful a tool for predictions of its demise to
be treated seriously. Rather, the Net needs to embrace a new usership who
understand that it is not a gismo for computer nerds but the opportunity
for everyone to enter the information age.

Tony Blair has already said that all public libraries will offer Internet
access. This is fine as far as it goes, though why it has not happened
previously beats me. But it is not nearly enough. If we are to bridge the
gap between those who know who the mystery minister is and those who do
not, or who want to know the verdict in trials such as the Louise Woodward
case, or who need background material for school projects, then every home
with a telephone should be linked up to the Internet.

The costs would be significant but not prohibitive and could be paid by
instalment through phone bills. If Mr Blair is as serious as he says he is
about open government, freedom of information and "education, education,
education", he should issue an edict now and aim to get everyone on the Net
before the millennium.