Gutenberg's printing press -- regarded as the greatest mind-liberator of all times -- brought an unforeseen consequence: the spread of sectarianism and the Thirty Years War. In much the same way, the Internet, by the very surfeit of seemingly neutral information it generates on horrors like Chechnya, could anesthetize the world to rotten things like war with unpredictable consequences. PNS commentator Thomas Goltz, author of "Azerbaijan Diary" (M.E. Sharpe, 1999) is currently working on a book on ethnic conflict in the post-Soviet Caucasus.

ISTANBUL -- Internet discussions groups are a beautiful thing. They allow you to collect a vast amount of information on a specific subject and then decide what is true or false, interesting or dull.

I used to belong to four or five such groups, all pertaining somehow or other to the former Soviet Union.

Some days I would receive in excess of 300 items, everything from news and feature stories that posting members thought significant to long-winded commentary and even personal attacks on others who posted to the list.

I do not count personal messages or "Spam."

There was always a lot of repetition. A Reuters' story from Moscow, say, about acting Russian President Vladimir Putin's electoral chances hinging on success in the war in Chechnya might be posted on both the Russian and the Chechen list, but also on the Central Asian, Caucasus and Azerbaijani lists

I say "might" because I have discontinued subscriptions to three of these services, however illuminating they may be. I was so inundated with news and commentary about very specific issues that I scarcely had time to think, much less open up a regular newspaper -- physically or electronically -- to read the sports or style pages. I still subscribe to two lists, although I am about to remove myself for the same reasons: There is just too much information coming down the electronic pipeline, much of it repetitive, self-indulgent, and a waste of time.

And possibly dangerous.

A recent TV discussion show considered the possibility that the Internet might help settle ethnic conflicts by allowing the free flow of information. My friend and fellow writer Robert Kaplan disagreed. Instead, more bad -- or highly selective, which may be the same thing -- information is getting into the hands of ever more poorly educated people who accept what they receive on their news digests and little more.

He noted that Gutenberg's printing press was regarded in its day as the greatest mind-liberator of all times. Mass-produced texts would bring literacy (and thus enlightenment) to places hand-copied Bibles could never reach. An unforeseen consequence of this new "literacy," however, was the spread of sectarianism and the Thirty Years War.

The Chechen list on the Internet, quasi-moderated by a very reasonable man, is a classic case in point. In addition to running every story concerning the current war in Chechnya issued by Reuters, the Associated Press, Agence France Press, Tass, DPA and even, amazingly, UPI (I once worked for them; do they still exist?), the daily digest also contains every story and editorial from dozens of major and minor newspapers throughout the world. But for every frontline-exclusive piece, there are at least one or two other that apparently built almost exclusively from wire agency copy. One can pick and chose what is true from completely diametrically opposed positions.

Then there is the commentary on all this electronic information, usually in the form of shrill disagreement -- which also includes the relevant paragraphs of the original -- thus further compounding the repetition. Imagine re-reading five or ten or even fifteen times, the same grisly sentences about the most recent claims and counterclaims of how many Russians or Chechens have died on a certain day.

Which brings me to the point of this essay.

Added to the very real horror of the current conflict in Chechnya is the surreal aspect of it being reduced to a Nintendo-like game for most observers.

The Russian government issues its numbers on a given day -- usually ridiculous -- and then the Chechen side issues its counter-claims. I will not bother to repeat the latest alleged score, but simply note how physically sick this death-tallying makes me.

Reducing the horror of war to nearly-neutral terms like "fighting," airborne bombing and missile attacks as "sorties" and bullet-to-the-brain and throat-slitting to "execution" is both nauseating and unsettling because we are teaching ourselves to accept those terms as normal, at least when fighting and sorties and executions happen sufficiently far from our terminals to allow us the luxury of being combat voyeurs.

What are our options? To draw a veil over violence, and ban all images and references to the phenomenon from TV, newspapers, radio and even the Internet?

Clearly not.

But somehow I feel that the very nature of the Internet, and especially independent discussion groups are anesthetizing the world to rotten things like war in an awful way, with unpredictable psychological consequences.

And our new found freedom to chose just the information we want to believe in, and then forward it to similar-thinking friends, does indeed seem to have a disquieting similarity to Gutenberg's mass produced tracts, that led both to literacy and to Europe's first real world war.