My conclusion is that humanity/culture has changed to due the internet, and do not judge it good or bad. I am old enough to have existed in the pre-Internet culture, where it was unknown to me as a kid, and as a teenager I was part of its pre-WWW niche subculture.
So I have seen the change since Day 1, and could see both the good and bad aspects, and do not deny them. I appreciate the accessibility of information, entertainment, and instant communication at my fingertips, but understand that there are many negative cultural and health trends due to the net.
Check out this cool discussion from 2000 (I think) trying to predict the influence of the internet
Good or bad is a judgment the future gets to make, not us; I think that all we can be sure of right now is that the Internet is one of the biggies: fire, the wheel, agriculture, writing, moveable type, the Industrial Revolution. I am very bad at recalling where I read things (perhaps one of you knows) but I read once that one collateral cultural change that came about as a result of printing was a move toward standardization in architecture. In Medieval Europe, hardly any building or house or hovel looked like any other, but after people got used to the regularity and straight lines of print, we began to get standard bricks, blocks, sizes, symmetries and so forth. I do note that, in my list of what I call “hinges of history”, the pace of change, with the developments resulting therefrom, is accelerating. Not a profound observation, I know; but maybe the future that will judge this question is coming sooner than we think.
Whoever said it’s the best of times and the worst of times is pretty much spot on. I do think there will be untold negative repercussions that we don’t even have an inkling about yet.
This. Hell, I don’t even need a keyboard. I have access to almost all human knowledge in my pocket! Even in Star Trek: TNG they had to ask the ship’s computer to look things up for them.
The Internet is a wonderful and almost entirely good thing,* even if it takes a while for our customs, mores and laws (heck, even our way of life) to catch up with it.
*Yes, it lets people post revenge porn, and facilitates the sharing of child pornography, and it makes whole classes of people unemployed. But we’ll figure out how to deal with all of those challenges.
Watching Die Hard 3 the other day, there’s a plot point where they have to figure out the 21st President of the United States. Since they can’t just look it up on their smart phone, they spend 20 minutes of the movie running around yelling at each other about it before a know-it-all finally tells them. The juxtaposition with how this plot point would be demolished in the current day only amused me more.
Anyway, the internet’s an amazing thing and it’s right up there with fire and the wheel, as mentioned by Totenfeier. Now, if people want to blame modern wars on the wheel because you couldn’t transport cannons without them, I’m not of the opinion that blame is being pointed in the right direction here. Same idea for the internet.
The internet is a resource. You can use it to do amazing things, many of which would be virtually impossible to do without the internet.
If you have access to the internet and you’re only doing mundane things with it, then that’s on you. You would be doing mundane things without the internet as well.
The internet has created as sort of “winner take all” economy. Because of the far reach of the web and economies of scale, a person can take a great idea and make billions off of it. But that wealth tends to consolidate within a relatively small group of people.
The classic example is Uber, which is worth billions IIRC, but has few full-time employees and almost no physical assets. But it’s happening in other industries as well. Particularly yours, if you are in IT. In the old days, you used to start at a company at entry level, then over time work your way up. Maybe get to management or executive levels. Instead, companies tend to outsource most of their workforce to hourly contractors who don’t receive benefits, training, a career path or many of the other benefits of being a long-term employee. But in many cases, they may be “contractors” for years, as de facto employees of the company.
This may not be strictly related to the Internet, and more of a consequence of the shift to “news as infotainment”, but I find myself in a cycle of watching the news, being kind of bored with it at times, and wishing for “something interesting”. Then I’m horrified to think that with all the stuff going on in the world right now, that I’m finding none of it “interesting”, as it’s usually just horrifying stuff elsewhere in the world that I have little effect upon, or it’s local stuff that’s the same old horrifying stuff like child abuse, murders, etc…
I think if I wasn’t so conditioned to think of it as more of an entertainment source instead of an information source, I wouldn’t be so callous about the whole thing.
The internet is the most amazing thing ever. But with its great amazingness comes some great drawbacks. Gotta learn how to balance it, is all. Don’t use the internet for dating (unless you want to date losers), don’t get your news from Joe Bob’s blog, and dear God never, ever read the comments on anything. Ever. Oh, and don’t use the internet to diagnose whatever illness you think you have either. The answer will always be it’s nothing or it’s cancer.
Do use the internet to learn how to knit. Bless you, YouTube. Also use it to look up negative reviews of movies you hated so you can choke on your own rage and feel better about how stupid you thought “The Departed” was.
The internet is really more of a two-edged sword than anything else. On one hand, it allows the little guy a much more level playing field, in terms of being able to come up with a slick website and online marketing materials, and being able to leverage distribution channels like say… Amazon or Ebay.
But the other edge is that the same global reach allows deep pocketed competitors to basically filter-feed the web for good ideas, then if they’re not patented just so, or if they’re something that can’t be patented, they can use their greater market presence to outcompete the little guy, or even to pull a Microsoft and include your cool functionality in your next operating system and eliminate the market for that product entirely.
Was it much better looking for a job before the internet? It’s frustrating to have to dig through stuff online and email out a 100 resumes and applications, but I would think that would be better than driving from place to place, or hoping the classifieds would have something.
I don’t know about your internet habits, but I’ve never had much trouble avoiding articles dissecting each frame of a trailer. If it’s not a movie I’m interested in, or if it is and I just don’t want the spoilers, I just can avoid clicking on it.
I agree that it is troublesome that for so many people now they have to be available at all times for work. I’m fortunate that it’s not the case for me, but I know a lot of people do have jobs and companies like that. You can’t solely blame the internet for that though, I think there’s a lot of factors that contribute to that.
I do wonder about kids growing up now, since a lot of their dumb mistakes will be online and available for others to see. I’m guessing how we view experiences in the past will change. Like for a politician running for Senate in 10 years it will be less embarrassing when pictures surface of them puking heavily while wearing a stupid Halloween costume, because similar pictures could be found from social media of almost any politician of the same age.
There is a troublesome amount of racist, homophobic, xenophobic and otherwise crazy tirades online, but in some ways that shows the progress we’ve made, in that increasingly a lot of people have to go online to do those tirades. Just 50 years back, those same people would have felt comfortable giving those same tirades in person to whoever was around, but that’s not as much the case anymore.
Sounds like an interesting book, I’d like to read it. We might be more distracted now, but I’m not sure about us comprehending less than ever. The Flynn Effect suggests that we are steadily getting smarter. Entertainment is becoming faster, more complex, and more serialized, requiring more concentration.
We probably are processing information differently. In ancient times, people could memorize long passages and epic poems, because that was how those stories were passed down, since reading and writing was not common. Most people today wouldn’t be able to memorize the whole Iliad and recite it. But that doesn’t make someone dumb today for not being able to memorize the Iliad, it just means that their brain is better able to work in other ways.
I can understand the worries. But I’ve also seen stories that people had the same worries about landline telephones, telegraphs, and even printed books. Each new communication technology that comes along, people worry about how this is the end of conversation and future generations are doomed, but somehow we keep going along. The way we communicate will change, but it doesn’t mean that relationships are doomed.
And really, online dating is pretty much a misnomer, but calling it “online meeting possible people for dates” is not a good name. Once two people have met, whether they first met online or at a bar, they can pretty much proceed down the same path.
In the old days there were classified ads. And before internet-based hiring I got a stack of resumes 8 inches high from our contracting agency when I was looking for contractors. Which I couldn’t search through for keywords.
But for the most part you didn’t apply to a job unless you kind of knew it was a good match, which meant HR was not overwhelmed by applications which meant that HR people actually got back to candidates.
This. I remember applying for my first job out of college in 95. Internet was just getting started and a lot of companies didn’t have real web pages yet and Monster, etc didn’t really exist. So my job search consisted of the following:
On campus interviews and job fairs
Applying for ads in the newspaper
Those giant “Job Search” books that had the Recruiting contact for most large firms.
Networking
You would pick a dozen or so companies at a time, type up or “mail merge” a bunch of cover letters and resumes and literally mail them out. Within a few weeks you would either get a call back or a nice “thanks but no thanks” rejection letter.
I remember a number of companies actually paid to fly me into town for interviews, like they actually gave a shit!
Don’t get me wrong. I few years later, I thought it was great how you just had to post a resume on CareerBuilder or Monster and if you had any skills, you would get hit with legitimate interview requests.
But now, I literally don’t use any of those job sites because I just get bombarded with crap requests for 3 month contracts in Bumfuck Anystate, USA at a bill rate a third my salary.
Which kind of speaks to one of my two main complaints about the internet:
By making everything essentially a commodity, whether it’s jobs (Monster/LinkedIn), dating (Tinder), or whatever, and having access to a market that consists of basically everyone, it reduces everything to the least common denominator that can be picked up by a search algorithm.
Because the business model is to attract as many “clicks” or “eyeballs” as possible, and most people on the planet are stupid, everything on the internet is marketed in such as way as to attract the greatest number of idiots.
How old are you? I’m 33 and I’ve been to 52 weddings (as of Saturday), about a third of which are relationships that started online. Tindr is hookup-focused, so not many relationships start there, but PlentyOfFish, et al., seem to be productive.
My first job was from a job fair (national in size) for new CS PhDs. My second came from a headhunter (a good one) and my third came from networking.
We still do that, because we recruit nationally.
I’ve seen data that these sites are quite ineffective for getting jobs, a lot less effective than the methods you described above.
There is a radio ad in the Bay Area, aimed at employers, from a company which posts job ads on all these sites for your, so the resumes “roll in.” Yeah, like a wave of sewage, no doubt.
Monster wants lots of clicks. Any employer using Monster wants the smallest number of good resumes which will let him or her fill the job.
Just like books. ebooks are mostly a commodity. While there are exceptions, you are most likely going to get something worth reading from a regular publisher - be it in paper or electronic format Networking to get employees screens out the bozos pretty well.