I heard a very absorbing lecture this afternoon by Dr Mathias Döpfner, the Humanitas Visiting Professor, who was taking time out from his day job as CEO of the German media corporation Axel Springer to offer Cambridge his thoughts on the digital revolution. He nailed his colours to the mast early on by saying that digitization was the fourth of mankind’s great inventions, on a continuum that included language, writing and print. And in the first half of his talk the internet was defined as an inherently anti-authoritarian space of free speech, the ideal culmination of the crusading efforts of generations of campaigners against censorship, and the bane of totalitarian regimes everywhere.

The second half of Döpfner’s lecture sketched out the other side of the argument, looking at the way we expose our private lives on social networking sites, and exploring the potential dangers of beguiling gizmos such as face-and-place recognition and global positioning systems. We may enjoy ‘geotagging’ our photos, or navigating unfamiliar cities without getting lost, but the technology that allows us to do this also allows us to be tagged and navigated in unprecedented ways. Of course, the companies that store our personal information and create new games for us to play claim to want only the best for us—‘Don’t be evil’, as Google puts it, plumbing unsuspected depths of banality—but then oppression frequently wears a smile. Döpfner’s conclusion (somewhat at odds with his initial premise) was that the internet is really nothing in itself. Like language, it is neither good nor evil; it reflects back the kind of society we want to be. Still, he concluded, only the worst kind of cynic would want to damn the internet as a threat to the free world rather than celebrating its enormous potential to release the unfree.

It was powerful stuff, but from the tone of the questions I suspect that some members of the audience were a shade more cynical than the speaker. The question of the relationship between capitalism and the internet was a significant unaddressed issue—do the free market in ideas and the free market in iphones have to go hand in hand? Are we in the West more interested in the spread of freedom or of profit? Or, to put it slightly less controversially (as did the Chair John Thompson in an eloquent final question), what relationship should there be between private companies and governments in regulating the web—given that the former act chiefly in their own interests, rather than in ours?