The Internet, the Pope, and the iPod

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > The Internet, the Pope, and the iPod

Current News

The Internet, the Pope, and the iPod

5/23/2005

By Tracy Mitrano
Director of IT Policy and Computer Law and Policy,
Cornell University (NY)

This spring I had a little epiphany. Asked to teach Internet law to seventeen students from around the world at a special program in Piacenza, Italy (the instruction, thank heavens, is in English), I was reminded of what makes the Internet so exciting: the opportunity for communication, relationships, and possibly even greater understanding among people from all over the world. A number of students were from the financial community in Western Europe seeking information technology and management knowledge to augment their banking skills. But there were also two students, one from Dublin and the other from Manila, who had met in the program and who had decided to start their own online business together. A student from Malawi and one from Vietnam, each country currently having only about 10 percent network penetration, expect to bring back learning to help modernize their mother countries. A woman from Belize dreams of doing something creative with information technology. A Church of Latter Day Saints former missionary from Salt Lake City, now married to an Italian woman and the only US citizen in the class, wants to do Web site translations from his new, adopted home in Italy. A banker from Sudan and I become friends.

A week after I leave Italy, Pope John Paul II dies. Not Catholic, I nonetheless am entranced by the throngs of people who converge on Saint Peter’s Square to celebrate his life. What touches me is not the dogma nor the theology, but the sense that in these internationally troubled and divisive times people from all over the world come together in search of communion. A few weeks later, with the proceeds of my teaching stint in Italy, I finally break down and buy an iPod. Long a music lover, I download bunches of songs from my iTunes account and take my new toy on walks with me in the spring that has sprung, finally, in Ithaca. But having the music is not my only pleasure; I fully recognize that with this purchase I have joined a club, the legions of students I see everyday on the Cornell campus, and around town, and all over the world it seems, who have those tantalizing white wires hanging from their ears. I have something now in common with my own children, who wouldn’t dream of going to school without their totem Minis. Commercial, material, and innovative, this device is the secret password to the ranks of a society much larger, and infinitely much cooler, than me.

The Internet, the Pope and the iPod, seemingly improbable companions, all share that sense of transcendental connection. Currently working in information technology, and perennially interested in the related politics, I ponder how I can turn this insight into policy. “Build it and they will come” rings the Field of Dreams mantra in my ears. And so technologists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and computer scientists have built the hardware, engineered the protocols, laid the oceanic cables, written the software, and designed the applications. And we have come to it from all over the world, from a vast variety of professions, interests, personalities, and proclivities. For better and for worse the whole spectrum of human behavior exhibits itself digitally. What an opportunity.