Julian Cole

With a columnist's eye for sport, the "Archbishop thinks Internet is evil" story looks promising. After all, churchmen making batty pronouncements about modern life are surely fair game.

As reported in this newspaper, the Archbishop of York is worried about the Internet, a view he will expand on soon in the magazine of the Conservative Christian Fellowship.

Already this matter is proving a little more complicated than an ambushing columnist might wish. This is because Dr David Hope, generally known for his rationality, doesn't actually say the Internet is evil, but points out it has "potential for evil".

In a way this is not saying much, as everything has a capacity for evil, much as people do - though I wouldn't wish to tread along that sermonising route for fear of sounding like an archbishop.

Dr Hope acknowledges that the Internet is "a hugely fascinating tool, and certainly in terms of education and the dissemination of education it's a cause for great excitement". But he frets the technology might "ultimately devour us" by turning us into a nation so obsessed with the screen that we are unable to communicate with real people.

"One is concerned," Dr Hope adds, "that we are becoming a society without a soul."

This may be so but I'm not sure it's fair to blame the Internet. After all, souls generally come under the province of church leaders; they think we've got them and they want us to look after ours. In this they are like spiritual mechanics who think we should look under our bonnets every now and then.

Anyway, Dr Hope does have a point in a way he might not realise. The computer on which this column is written has the Internet tangled up in its innards.

So I logged on and, purely for research purposes, executed a search for the word "evil". The computer quickly found "about 2,165,160" pages. It is an oddity of the Internet that you type in a request and an absurdly large number of "hits" are recorded. The trouble is, many of these are too bizarre or useless for words.

Going in search of evil does make a person nervous. What might be unleashed in such a reckless manner? As you might have guessed, heavy metal music and Satanism loom large. I was intrigued by a site devoted to Evil Elvis, but this proved to be a dud. Other sites had long thorny titles and referred to "magick lefthand" churches and the like.

But aside from all those rings of darkness and gateways to hell, most of the sites appear to be dry religious tracts exploring the role of the Devil in the Bible. Stopping by at one, I learn from Brother Robert Roberts that the Lord's Prayer originally read: "Deliver us from the Evil One." Very many words were written on the possible reasons for this alteration, but I didn't read them.

And that in a way is one of the quirks of the Internet. It is a huge, spiralling resource offering more information than any one head could absorb in a lifetime. There is so much out there - much of it impenetrable dross. What is good can be hard to find.

Many sites are interesting, some fascinating - this newspaper's own site (www.thisisyork.co.uk) is an award-winner. But as you chase your own tail down a maze of electronic alleyways, you sometimes wonder where it's all going to end.

Perhaps it is worth recalling the words of Isaac Shoenberg, who on being shown the first television set said: "Congratul-ations, gentlemen. You have invented the greatest time-waster of all time."

Now I'm a great fan of the Internet, in which the future lies curled up somewhere, but sometimes I worry someone has gone and invented the second greatest.

But evil? Er, no.

13/04//00

If you have any comments you would like to make, contact Julian Cole directly at julian.cole@ycp.co.uk

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