The internet is an evil construct that’s causing us to submissively open our arms to totalitarianism! No, this isn’t another one of my posts about how our society is entering the world of The Matrix. This is the belief and fear of Barry Sonnenfeld, the director of Men in Black, Men in Black II and Wild Wild West, clearly a fan of lighter sci-fi than of the Orwellian sort. Speaking this week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show in Vegas, he lashed out against the internet, because of how it’s threatening democracy:
Sonnenfeld fears that children today will grow up with “no concept of the right to privacy and in fact not understand the need for it. Because the Facebook generation is not concerned with what people know about them . . . they will have no problem with additional governmental supervision, spying and intervention. They will be thrilled that the Internet will be able to follow their every move.
Bonnenfeld’s main issue, of course, may be with his claim that kids are on the internet all day long and may not take a break this summer to go see Space Chimps, which he produced. Or that one day we’ll no longer have the freedom to choose which dumb comedic Will Smith sci-fi movies we go to see. But he does have a point, nonetheless. And the point does in fact support my writings about the plugged in generation and its Matrix-like passivity.
There is, however, the other way of looking at the internet, as actor Tim Robbins addressed, also at the NAB Show:
“just when we were close to a national news media providing a general consensus on what the truth is,” he added, “along comes the Internets [sic] that allows its users a choice on the kind of news it watches and the YouTube. My God, we’ve got to stop them.”
Obviously we’re at a crossroads, where some people are using the force of the internet for good and others are letting it take them over. But for movie fans, the horizon looks mighty cool, with its combination of The Matrix, Star Wars, Spider-Man 3, Equilibrium and other geeky delights (Robbins also claimed: “We are at an abyss as an industry and as a country.” That’s cool, I love The Abyss, too).
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