OK, I’m no Luddite; I’m a web developer, and early on I’ve been amazed and fascinated by the awesome power and potential of the internet. Basically having almost the entire collected knowledge of humanity at one’s fingertips is crazy great. I’ve fixed many appliances, power tools, vehicles, etc. by googling the problem. Can’t remember say, a Shakespeare quote or the name of an actor in that sitcom rerun you just watched? No problem! Want to listen to an old song but you broke the CD in 1997? Almost every song you can think of is streamable for a small fee. Same with movies and TV shows. Shopping has been revolutionized-- you can order almost anything you want online, and a day or two later it’s delivered right to your doorstep.
But…there’s a dark side. Every generation since Socrates has been saying “kids these days…” but kids these days are actually different than my generation. When I was young in those dim pre-internet days, I hung out with friends, we went out and did things. I got my driver’s license and a job as soon as I could; I went out to parties and concerts and things. Those were very important rites of passage. But kids and teens now keep in touch with friends mostly virtually and are in no particular hurry to go out into the world and get driver’s licenses and jobs. I’m sure there are exceptions but I’ve seen this in my friends’ kids and my own teenagers. They are MUCH more isolated and sheltered than we used to be (and I’m talking pre-pandemic). Yes, part of this is the fact that our parents let us be much more free-range than we do as parents, but the internet does have a lot to do with it.
The internet has been very conducive to the spread of crazy conspiracy theories like QAnon. Conspiracy theories are like a mind virus, and the internet is a big indoor trump rally. Or, conspiracy theories are like flammable gender-reveal parties, and the internet is acres and acres of dry grass and tinder. Or, [insert your own simile]. Social media manipulates our opinions and behavior and uses our personal information as a commodity to be bought and sold.
Is too much information without the proper context or informed knowledge of the info a good thing? We’ve all gone on WebMD at times and wrongly convinced ourselves we have a terminal disease. We’re expected to absorb so much info these days, so quickly, that it’s often overwhelming to our caveman brains. I’ve heard it described as filling up a teacup with a firehose.
I’ll wrap this up with a bit from comedian Pete Holmes I like. It goes something like, “these days with the internet we can get any question answered instantly. But before the internet, we’d talk to each other, we’d ask our friends questions and discuss things. Before the internet, you might wonder ‘where was Tom Petty born?’ You’d ask your friends and they’d say I don’t know, somewhere in the south? And one day you’re walking down the street and you see a girl with a Tom Petty shirt, and you’d ask her, and she’d say ‘Florida’. And she became your wife.”
Any downsides of the Internet are small compared to its benefit. There has never before been such an instrument in human history that made knowledge, info, media and stuff so widely accessible to so many people at once. It’s truly networked the whole world together. Now you can play video games against someone in Argentina, have a Facebook conversation with someone in Bulgaria, look up information on a German website, click ‘like’ on a Mexican’s status, all in one day. You can DIY so many things on the spot, find info in seconds that could have taken hours fifty years ago.
It’s undoubtedly a blessing, although a mixed blessing.
There are so many things I couldn’t do without the internet, like arguing with complete straingers around the world about whether the internet is a blessing or a curse.
It lowers the barrier to entry for people to express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, allowing people to express themselves that otherwise wouldn’t.
It also lowers the barrier to entry for people to express their thoughts, ideas, and opinions, allowing people to express themselves that otherwise shouldn’t.
We have always needed to filter the information that came in. Even when we were hunter gatherers, I’m sure there were trolls stirring up trouble, liars bragging on themselves, and leaders falsely promising to lead us to a new prosperity, if only we would follow them.
It’s a new information stream, and it doesn’t come pre-filtered by the gatekeepers who used to filter the information that came to us through media. We will need to become accustomed to it, to use critical thinking, and to create our own filters in order to determine reality.
I wouldn’t complain about the internet itself. Social media, on the other hand…
Okay, this forum could be considered a form of social media, but if someone starts spouting conspiracy BS here, the mods would shut it down. It’s a vastly smaller platform than Twitter, which (until fairly recently) made no attempt to moderate its content. Too much money being made, and not enough being spent on staff.
I recall reading stories about murders being livestreamed, and it took Facebook hours or even days to take that material off the website. (Of course, maybe those stories are themselves false. Not the livestreams, but the timelines.)
The Internet is great. The problems only started when they let the riff raff in. If you don’t know the path to someone through decvax or ihnp4, you shouldn’t be emailing them.
But seriously, the death toll from Covid-19 would be much higher without the internet. Imagine the pressure to keep offices and schools open. Imagine the pressure for clubs to meet, and churches.
Plus the Internet saves energy in some ways. My TV is dying - Jake Tapper was starting to look like he came from Pandora - and I could find and order a new one without driving all over the place. And I’m close to everything.
Like ANY technology, it is both. Personally I believe that the blessings of this particular tech outweighs the curses by many orders of magnitude. YMMV.
To paraphrase Homer Simpson: the Internet is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. It’s no mystery why both drug dealers and websites refer to their customers as “users”.
Once again people use Internet when they mean World Wide Web. Internet is the backbone technology and www is the media on it. Don’t blame the technology.
The way I see that the understanding of these things has changed is that a “library bomb” is a bomb that goes of in a library but a “internet bomb” is a bomb whose building instructions were found from www. How come that if I found a book from library that tells me how to build a bomb, and believe me there are such books in libraries, is not a “library bomb”? It’s because libraries are much older than www and people then did not blame the source of information but the perpitrator.
Yes, the lack of traditional societal filters is itself both the blessing and the curse of the internet, uhhh, World Wide Web I mean- thanks @tavaritz, suppose I should have known that.
“Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate.”
Re Luddites, let’s recall they were the most technologically advanced workers in the world. They smashed new looms because the bosses brought in new looms to reduce the workforce and put people out of work. The question is always, who benefits from this particular technology and who loses?