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Dr Helen Petrie of the University of Hertfordshire, who set up the experiment in which four people were locked in a room with only the internet for support, has studied those who consider themselves hooked on the net. As well as finding that women were just as likely to be addicted to the internet as men, she has discovered that the fact that we cannot meet face to face has had a considerable effect on the behaviour of those regularly using e-mail and the net. "It is text based and so you can't hear the intonation of the voice or see someone's facial expression, and in that sense the internet can seem a somewhat brutal place without sufficient emotion."
Adams has little time for such arguments. "Funny such a criticism wasn't aimed at letter writing," he comments. And to those who are put off by the amount of rubbish on the internet and are sceptical about the credibility of what they find, Adams poses a direct question. "How can you trust what you read on the web? The answer is, of course, that you can't, any more than you can trust what people tell you on the phone, or in the street, or across the dinner table. We are all naturally sceptical of what we are told - or should be. Newspapers and broadcasters engender a sense of trust which is, of course, utterly spurious. What should concern us is not that we can't take what we read on the internet on trust - of course you can't, it's just people talking- but that we ever got into the dangerous habit of believing what we read in the newspapers or saw on TV."
It's a view supported by journalist Browning. "There's strictly no reason for anyone to believe a word I'm saying! The advantage of the internet is that it is interactive, and you can find the best of a sort of peer review process coming to bear on any views expressed. The bad thing is that there are so many points of view that it requires all of us to be more careful. Ultimately the only gatekeeper is your own common sense and you have to run everything through that."
Despite the huge number of sites and the present uncontrolled growth of the internet, Douglas Adams remains optimistic about what he considers to be a form of evolution. "Certainly the net is a jungle, but we use the word jungle when we want to emphasise the brutality of competitive life. We use the term rainforest when we want to describe exactly the same thing but emphasise its beauty, complexity, and all the good creative forces that come out of the same essentially Darwinian struggle for survival."
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