By: Taban Khajehnassiri
Do you remember that empty Coca-Cola bottle once tossed from an airplane
and landed in an African desert in a movie called "The Gods Must Be
Crazy"? I still have this picture in my mind almost in a haze. That bottle
somehow disrupted the normal life of a tribe in the area, and bushmen
called it "An Evil Thing" in the movie and threw it away.
Do you remember that empty Coca-Cola bottle once tossed from an airplane
and landed in an African desert in a movie called "The Gods Must Be
Crazy"? I still have this picture in my mind almost in a haze. That bottle
somehow disrupted the normal life of a tribe in the area, and bushmen
called it "An Evil Thing" in the movie and threw it away.
Since that time whenever I hear someone calls the Internet "A Bad Thing", I reload this
very misty picture of that movie to my mind! Sometimes I ask myself what the difference
is between the Internet and that Coca-Cola bottle! And I answer to myself
that first "the Internet" is not empty, it is full of information,
millions of pages and documents are there to discover and rediscover at
the same time and that's amazing.
We know Coca-Cola as a successful icon
of American Business especially in marketing a brand throughout the world,
but the Internet is not merely American, it is a global means and actually
nobody owns it, in the meantime, the Internet is not seen as one single
web site, many many sites and at the same time poeple have made it up. The success of a site can not be considered as the success of the Internet.
We can see the good, the bad
and the ugly, within the Internet boundries. Very important is that the
Internet has not been tossed from any kind of airplane and clearly here
(our country) is not an African one and a desert at all and we are not bushmen! That's why, I believe WE CAN
control and manage it by not calling it an EVIL thing!
We are full of
history, culture, literature, philosophy and even science and technology.
That's why we have the power to take advantage of it as a good container
for the years ahead and for our own materials.
At present, I see my fellow Iranians
are using the Internet as a means of information resource and
communication and that is interesting. About two years ago, I wrote in a
magazine here about the history and first steps as well as the status of cybercafes, and today I
see them growing and finding popularity among our people in a very rapid
way and that's the way it goes and let's say the Internet has come to and is
here to stay.
For those of us who can not manage the time and appetite for
the Internet and to avoid any kind of Cyberspace Addiction, it is
recommended to use a Diet Internet just like a Diet Coke! :-) Imagine that
the said Coca-Cola bottle was not empty in that movie, bushmen had to try
it first, could they tell from? what differences and also similarities
could you find between these two, the Internet and the bottle? A web site
can also be studied as a bottle, how well can we market its content -
products and services? The shape of that bottle, here is the idea of
designing, does it matter to be professionally?
This article first published electronically as an editorial of WWN - February 5 2000.