First published: Joint Church Press: Methodist Recorder, Baptist Times, Church Times, Church of England Newspaper, 16 August 2001
It is now nearly a year since our last evaluation of the benefits of the Internet for Christians. In that time surveys and reports have seemed to suggest that the Net is either dead or dangerous and quite possibly detrimental to health and wealth. Internet take-up is said to have slowed, shipments of new PCs have fallen for the first time ever, and perhaps we have reached saturation point, with the remaining unconnected adults unwilling to go online. Commercially, for all the media attention it gets, the Net appears to be unviable with many web businesses folding in the last 18 months and others suggesting that the Internet was just a fad. Email usage has actually declined, particularly amongst youth, for whom text messaging has become more important. Religious pundits and dignitaries have called the Net evil, trivial, and a factor in turning us into a 'zombie society' and 'soulless nation'. Financial fraud, security mistakes, pornography, and chat room dangers, all combine to give an aroma of fear rather than trust of things online. Are these signs ominous or is there a brighter outlook?
Dot.com Death and Hi-Tech Downturn - is the Net dead?
A new report by webmergers.com accounts for 555 closures over the 18 months to June 2001, 10% of those in June alone. Over the same period half of the US dot.com workforce has been laid off. The current closure rate is reportedly 9 times higher than in the first half of 2000.
UK company failures amounted to around 15,000 businesses in each of the last 2 years representing just over 1% of those trading. The proportion of these that were Internet businesses is not known but Business 2.0 magazine, 'the voice of the new economy' and which itself closed down in May 2001 after just a few issues, regarded Internet start-up failures as disproportionately reported on. Perhaps 50-60 UK businesses closed during the dot.com collapse of 2000.
Because these featured big names (Intersaver, Letsbuyit, PSInet etc) or celebrity personalities (e.g., Joanna Lumley and Clickmango) media attention was drawn to them, as was that of those eagerly waiting for the new economy to fail. In America, a whole pink-slip party culture has grown up around those who have suffered during the period of cost cutting including extensive lay offs amongst big names such as Alta Vista, Amazon and AOL. Alta Vista's parent company's share price has fallen by 98% and the expense of being a portal has been realised and so it is returning to its core activity of being a search engine. The BBC has also publicised for the first time the huge cost of its free online news and media services.
The dot.com market is not dead, but perhaps it is a little more realistic. An improved emphasis on customer service should become apparent as recent surveys suggest that Internet businesses have largely failed in keeping the customer either informed or satisfied, leaving more than a third of emails unanswered, delivering less than half of goods on time (48%), and many of these without a receipt.
Internet Fraud - Facts And Fallacies
UK credit card sales in 2000 amounted to some £3.5 billion, fraud accounted for just £190 million, just over 5%. Actually, 5% is quite a high figure, 1 in 20 shopping trips. This must be due to the rise of credit card fraud on the Internet. In reality, the maximum extent of UK Internet card losses due to fraud are thought to be £4.75 million, or 2.5% of total fraud, or about 0.1% of all card transactions. Thus, statistically, you are 99.9% safe on the Internet - you are more likely to lose your details during the five minutes that the waiter disappears with your card than you are on the Net.
A survey for MasterCard in Europe found that 50% of all online fraud took place with 'adult' sites, the victims of which were also less likely to complain. So to cut your risk in half simply avoid the more risqué sites, something you would expect Christians to be doing anyway. Another survey by Internet Fraud Watch found that 80% of failed supply of goods was from auction sites.
Practical measures, nonetheless, to reduce fraud can be taken. Always keep a record of your web purchases, some sites will send you an email copy of your purchase or give you instructions to print out the page you are viewing - better still, why not copy and paste the details, including the merchant's contact information to a document on your computer, perhaps creating a new contact in Outlook with a record of your order history.
When purchasing, always order from a web site that lists a phone number and a UK address. Why not ring them to ask a few questions about the product before purchasing. Don't be lulled into a false sense of security by 'logos' such as the WHICH? Web Trader hallmark - it is a good idea but not yet fully implemented. At the beginning of 2001 less than a third of those displaying the logo had completely complied with the conditions, including the Consumer Association's own TaxCalc web site which left nearly 3000 purchasers' credit card details viewable online.
You may prefer to print out the web page you were ordering from without finalising the transaction and simply send a cheque and mail order request instead. Many B2B (business-to-business) sites still prefer to supply the goods and invoice for cheque payment or ring you back to take a credit card over the phone.
If you are using your credit card online, it is a good idea to take out a second card with a different provider and keep all your Internet transactions on the one card. This way you can easily spot spurious and duplicate charges. While you are at it why not apply for the new card online with perhaps, Egg, Marbles, or the AOL (MBNA) card, all of which give you additional security guarantees and either reward points or 1-2% discounts on purchases.
An extra level of protection is provided by an SSL or Secure Socket Layer indicated by an https:// prefix rather than the usual http:// and a yellow padlock in Internet Explorer. Even these can be deceptive though and try to avoid using your back and forward buttons if you want to stay secure. In fact, many smaller retailers can be more secure as they often pass your credit card details straight on to a card merchant or payment-clearing service's secure site without ever seeing or storing your details. The scare stories of thousands of customer card details being exposed online have all been with big institutions that store your details in databases insecurely attached to the Internet.
Is the Net trivial and frivolous?
A recent prize winning report about religion on the Internet concluded that the Net trivialised faith. Naomi Cornwell, a broadcast journalist student, won the new Justin Phillips Award for religious journalism in March 2001. Cornwell's report explored the increasing use of the Internet to explore religion and spirituality online in the light of declining traditional church attendances. Some of her examples were of websites that appeared to give religion a bad name. But the same report could be read differently. The existence of a vibrant market in online religion shows a lively interest in spirituality and a need for better and more orthodox sites to inform 21st century seekers. TIME magazine, 4 June, ran an article "I once was lost, but now I'm wired". Its opening line was "Searching for God? The Internet may not substitute as a place of worship but it's aiding many on their journey". Many is probably an understatement. One of the best and rising stars amongst search-engines, Google.com, displays 22 million links for 'God', second only to 'sex' at 23.6 million. (These figures have apparently now risen to 24 million for 'God' and 60 million for 'sex' - Pornography has not just doubled on the web, though, Google has just found more of the sites that already exist below the tip of the iceberg. It is estimated that perhaps 80% of the Net is still unindexed and churches are not as aggressive as the sex industry in getting their sites known.)
Net Abuse
Hopefully the perennial suggestions about banning the entire Internet in order to curtail the activities of the few that run illegal and immoral content sites, and the many more that view them, have been put to rest. One Internet columnist compared it to banning cars because they may contain pornography in the boot. Nevertheless, the ongoing issue of how to police the Internet is still of concern. Extreme solutions come up against freedom of information and the fact that the web and ISPs are only mediums of communication, not communicators themselves. It is the content that needs controlling, but how? Yahoo has recently been pressured by public outrage to pull all its online sales of adult videos. Nazi memorabilia was pulled from web auction sites. NTLWorld recently pulled 23 paedophilia newsgroups, discovered by a user searching for pokémon newsgroups but which was alphabetically located between alt.binaries.pedo... (US spelling) and alt.binaries.preteen.
If you find illegal material contact the Internet Watch Federation (www.iwf.org.uk, 08456 008844, report@iwf.org.uk).
Supanet, the UK's sixth most used ISP, found that nearly half its adult users felt unable to protect their children online and 2 years ago a Which? survey found that 58% thought that the Internet undermined public morality. Try out AOL, then, which has excellent child friendly features. Software for parental control of Net access includes Net Nanny, Cyber Patrol, Cyber Sentinel, N2H2, Cyber Snoop, CYBERsitter 2000 and the free We-Blocker (www.we-blocker.com), although this does not prevent chat, newsgroup or FTP access. We will look at some of these in detail in our September feature Christian Computer Software. In addition, a number of sites provide information for worried parents, e.g., www.chatdanger.com, www.childnet-int.org, www.parentsonline.gov.uk, www.safekids.com. Practical advice includes: locating the Internet connected PC in public space in the house, having time-outs, getting involved and taking courses yourself to understand the PC, oh, and not leaving your credit card lying around! It is a simple matter to check the Internet History log to see where your kids have been online and you could always be proactive and suggest they visit a Christian chat room, e.g., www.christiancommunity.co.uk. The best defence, though, is to become net savvy yourself, as many kids know how to get around Internet security controls as evidenced by today's teenage hackers who are just as able as the child in the 1980s film Wargames to break into defence agencies and to acquire credit card details online, for instance the Welsh teenager who just recently acquired Bill Gates credit card and sent him some presents!
Good News
Now for the good news, it's not all doom and gloom. Whilst use of the Internet in the UK may have only risen from 33% to 35%, as compared to 60% in the US and Canada, and 65% in Sweden, nevertheless, access to online PCs at home has risen from 6 to 10 million households. Government and charity-funded projects are successfully subsidising the provision of PCs to poor inner city communities to avoid a digital divide. School and library coverage is also now almost complete, despite IT being the worst taught subject in UK schools. Thus, whether the Luddites like it or not, we are now an Internet society. So, rather than hating it, start shaping it.
Free Advertising
Many secular web sites have been forced to close or start charging as revenue streams from online advertising have been slashed. Advertising in print media has also suffered as organisations move towards seeing their web site as their best form of self-promotion. In order to get your web site seen though may involve conventional publicity. Search-engines might be considered as free advertising but statistics show that you have to appear in the top 10-30 sites for a particular search to stand a chance of being noticed. Optimising your site for search-engine rankings has been referred to as a 'dark art', well at least a fine art. Many software tools are now available to submit your site to 2000+ search directories yet manual submission and hand tweaking of web code and content can still produce better results and even if you have designed the site yourself the services of a professional here can yield professional results. Well-designed Christian sites have also been known to feature in secular computing magazines, e.g., www.StGeorgesChurch.net, Lincolnshire.
Entertainment or Information?
In the nine months to February 2001 almost twice as many people in Europe went online for entertainment (59.3%) as for news or information (30.6%, source: Jupiter MMXI, Internet Magazine, June 2001). Yet 98% of generation X-ers (teens to twenties) do go online and are more likely to use the Net than a newspaper. So reaching out to this group must involve investment in Christian portals more than Christian print media. Examples include: www.christiancomment.com (comment on aspects of society, science, media - all from a Christian perspective), www.beliefnet.com (multi-faith, though broadly Christian), UK Christian Web (www.christianweb.org.uk), www.wyrecompute.co.uk and others.
Two phrases in the Internet commerce world that are commonly bandied about are b2c and b2b, meaning business-to-consumer or business-to-business. A new service due to be launched this September by Christian Resources Exhibitions will serve both business and consumer interests by providing an online exhibition of suppliers to the Christian market. In practice, church or individual purchasers will be able to find and compare Christian supplies from candles to computers and from photocopiers to prayer books.
Good use of Technology
Flash or fast - that is the question. Invariably, web sites are either fast and informative or flash and dynamic. By 'flash' we don't mean cool or style conscious but using Macromedia's Flash format for interactive graphics and animation. Whilst this adds addictive interactivity it can also slow down a site. So the right technology needs to be matched to the end purpose. Oasis's www.church.co.uk Flash style interface uses the visual metaphor of a house and its various rooms and floors. It is slightly confusing at first as if you know what you want you can't find it, but if you are willing to wander and explore then it's very clever. Project co-ordinator, James Griffin, was reported in an Evangelical Alliance article "Go into all the World Wide Web", idea, Jan 2001, as saying that the "web must be utterly central to evangelism in the next decade". Perhaps the Church should call this the Internet decade after the last one devoted to evangelism.
Using the future to look at the past
Researching the Jewish roots of the Christian faith, its Old Testament background, or the archaeology of its contemporaries, ancient Egypt, Babylon and Assyria, can all be done online. Even the elusive Hittites have a home page (www.asor.org/HITTITE/HittiteHP.html)! Some sources have abandoned the dilemmas of economic viability for small interest groups in print and turned exclusively to the Net. Jerusalem Perspective Online (www.jerusalemperspective.com) is just such a one, formerly a Jewish Roots Journal run by David Bivin, author of Understanding the Difficult Words of Jesus, it now exists solely online with free and paid subscription areas to informative articles.
An alternative model is to exist alongside the Net so as to continue to provide for those groups without access to the Internet, such as the elderly, poor, or those in the third world. Offering a similar resource to Jerusalem Perspective, Roots and Branches - the Hebraic Journal (www.rootsandbranchespress.com) aims to launch simultaneously online, in print, and as CD-Rom media, to gain maximum reach for its new theological magazine. As a sign of the times it will contain not only biblical articles and book reviews but also features on web sites and Christian software. Some sites are already offering dual media distribution. The Biblical Archaeology Society (www.bib-arch.org) uses web tools as well as trowel and pickaxe to deliver the content of the Bible Review, Biblical Archaeology Review and Archaeology Odyssey magazines.
Without embracing the future we cannot teach the past. Without understanding the past we will have no future.
Article by Jonathan Went (BMSoftware, NetResearcher.co.uk)
jon@bmsoftware.com
Jonathan Went advises on and supplies Christian software, acts as a Net researcher and journalist, an IT consultant and web designer, and runs a correspondence Biblical Hebrew made easy course. He can be contacted by email (jon@bmsoftware.com) or by phone on 01603 667393.
BMSoftware and NetResearcher.co.uk are Christian software, web design and Net Journalism specialists.LINKS TO AUTHOR'S SITES
Web Hosting, Design & Promotion: www.bmsoftware.com/webdesign
Biblical and multilingual software: www.bmsoftware.com
Biblical Hebrew correspondence course: www.biblicalhebrew.com
Christian study courses, resources and articles: www.biblicalstudies.co.uk
Roots and Branches - the Hebraic Journal: www.rootsandbranchespress.com
Christ for England Bible School: www.cfebibleschool.org.uk
Christian Comment: www.christiancomment.com
This article with its connecting links should be available online at:
www.bmsoftware.com/articles/netbenefit2001.htm - Previous related articles are also available online at:
www.bmsoftware.com/articles/netbenefit2000.htm
www.bmsoftware.com/articles/netbenefit.htm
For other online articles of a software or internet nature see: www.bmsoftware.com/articles