There is a moment at the Wood River Middle School when the bell rings and an uncontrollable force of nature gets loosed upon the world. A few hundred kids chattering away in the hallways as they rustle to their next classrooms fills me with great expectations. In all likelihood they will each have ready access to the world's great databases of information, and to other kids around the world, complete with virtual memories, translations and spell check. As a teacher, I am sometimes torn between training this sheer creative force, or just getting out of its way. Tapping into the creative potential of kids has always been the best hope for solving the world's problems, and now we need it more than ever. But will they use the World Wide Web to network, discover, and express new ideas? Or will it use them in order to create a new generation of insatiable consumers? This might depend on who controls it?
Ten years ago at a film festival in Katmandu, Nepal, there was a protest about Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch by a group of filmmakers from Pakistan, India, Nepal and other south Asian countries who had gathered to present a fascinating bunch of documentaries best described as too "culturally specific" for prime time TV in the states. These were tales of Hindu temple deities, Himalayan environmentalists, and a Pakistani singer named Nusrat Ali Khan. I'd heard Nusrat before, but had no idea how sacred his Sufi singing was considered by Pakistanis, many of whom were disturbed by his recent popularity in the West. The fact that he had become well known, even to a tourist like myself, was seen as a betrayal by a number of these young auteurs, who thought certain arts should be kept from international consumption. Good luck keeping anything from anyone these days. Last night, I found dozens of videos of Nusrat singing on the Web, and even a few older, black-and-white videos of his father, Fateh Ali Khan.
The filmmakers in Katmandu were fearful that Rupert Murdoch might keep their own work from the airwaves in the very countries they lived, raising cries of cultural imperialism. Murdoch had recently purchased Star TV Asia, which would grow to have a satellite footprint reaching 300 million people in 54 countries, and offering a mix of content that today looks familiar to an American cable subscription in form and content.
Star TV Asia represents only a small corner of the international media empire owned by Rupert Murdoch, which includes movie studios, 175 newspapers and dozens of television and radio networks with which he has been known to present his decidedly conservative viewpoint to hundreds of millions. None of this could take place without moving a tremendous amount of merchandise with billions of dollars of advertising revenue. But many young people see the Internet as more than a cash cow.
Myspace.com is a free social networking site, which combines personalized video, music and other digital media in a network of more than 200 million subscribers. It gathers more than 200,000 new members daily. Murdoch's recent purchase of Myspace and his plans to commercialize this viral giant in combination with Google's search capabilities will further increase its reach into several new countries, but at what cost? He continues to cast a large shadow over much of the world for the purpose of making a buck and spreading his own personal political ideas. The great hope of the Internet is that it can diminish cultural differences through curiosity and digital interaction, perhaps bringing humanity together for common causes. Let's hope Rupert knows when to get out of the way of this.
