Aditya Chati's response to a post on Indian Online Journalism

There is a fundamental problem here. The Net never said that it would change
people. The Net never said that it would improve human thought patterns,
sophisticate human thinking and lend a sudden maturity - emotional and
intellectual - to the human race.

The Net is a technology. A new medium if you will. The Net cannot make a
better world. Only people can. What the Net can do and has done is
considerably help those people who want to change the world. But it cannot
give the will to change the world. The will is from without.

The Net is democratic, and whatever said it is cheap. And because it is
democratic, it affords avenues to all. From the ridiculous to the sublime.
The Net does not give the ability to distinguish between the two though.
That is the ability of the human mind.

Today a single individual can tell a story. Information will get out however
much the print media governed by rich barons muzzles it.
One man with only an idea can hope to change the world. And that is what the
Net has given. That was possible earlier of course, but the Net has made it
substantially easier.

Why should anybody expect corporates to suddenly turn altruistic saints,
countries to stop fighting and the rich to start scattering largesse just
because the Internet has now come into being?

And even in today's world, things take time. The free transfer of
information made possible by the Internet is the beginning only. At least
nobody has a monopoly over knowledge and infomration now. The rest will
follow. The world will change only if there are enough people committed to
changing it. The Net has at least made it possible for people, facts, data,
to extend their scope and coverage.

Whether we use this reachability at all and what we use it for is the
decision that will change the world. Not the existence of the Internet.

The speculative, carpetbagging element is a pan-historic, pan-cultural
phenomenon. Why are we surprised that it has happened to the Internet? At
least that element has been eradicated pretty quickly, we should be thankful
for that.

There's no Internet doomsday as there's no Interent panacea. Our problems
are ours alone.

To scapegoat a technology for these problems strikes me as puerile, childish
and self-defeating.