This is hate speech against the species of Homo Interneticus. I will sue you to buy me a smartphone as a compensation. I am not yet Homo Interneticus Smartphonicus.
We have free speech. In the Preinternetic World, free speech was an illusion as Mainstream Media was censored by Political Correctness.
Homo Interneticus is not the same species as Homo Sapiens. Is it evolution or devolution?
^ Mutation. 
You mean you don’t get called by some guy named “Steve” who sounds like he learned English by watching Chinese television dubbed into English by heavily Indian-accented speakers, wanting you to go work in a helpdesk 3 states away because he saw the word “IT” in your resume online?
Preach it, brother.
I think it’s too early to tell, really.
Like others have said… it’s good and bad. I often describe it as, “It’s got everything you wanted, along with a lot of shit you didn’t”.
I might say that the television is the worst thing ever. Historically, I feel it’s done much more social destruction than the internet.
The internet hasn’t been around long enough to settle-out, IMHO. But I can’t wait to see where it all goes.
I disagree. That used to be the case, and I agree that ideally that would be the case. But nowadays movie trailers are like the Reader’s Digest abridged editions of books. The whole damn plot is in there. Major characters’ death scenes, turning points in the story, character motivations, all of it. Many comedies stick every single joke into the trailer. I avoid them at all costs if I actually care about seeing the movie.
It’s great. But it’s also more and more, about less and less.
I grew up pre-internet so I’ve seen both sides. With no internet we had an Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and there were always library books around, and daily and weekly newspapers and magazines. We watched much more TV, now my parents still watch a lot but I don’t, so much. Saying that I now watch everything good (and some not so much) that comes out of Hollywood and Pinewood Studios, so the quantity might not be much different but the quality of my leisure time certainly is.
When the internet was developing, there was a stage where downloading a film myself wasn’t possible but it was very easy to rent a copy (this was when I lived in China) for the princely sum of 1 Yuan per copy per night. So I’ve gone from having to pay full cinema price or wait until it showed on a terrestrial channel, to renting/buying cheaply what they had available, to streaming anything.
Also living away from home, 3,074 miles now but 5,501 miles previously, with the internet means I can read newspapers, watch TV and catch up with friends from back home every day. All of those are much easier today than when I was growing up, and now I live on a different continent. And I can communicate with people from different continents every day and choose the type of ‘genre’ of the conversation. I’d say The SD’s ‘genre’ is somewhat intellectual, reflective, mature and communicative. Someone else might prefer 9Gag’s or Fark’s genre/s, or prefer Twitter and whatever genre that has.
So all in all I’m broadly enthusiastic about the internet, although there are very, very bad bits where IS or other nasty group members are working. Without the internet I’m sure they’d still operate but it couldn’t be half as easy.
It’s all seemed so very organic and I haven’t noticed any changes personally, apart from my spelling has worsened but that’s a result of spell check and not the 'net. Today we have a mix of those born pre- and post-internet it’d be a good thing to compare the views of both on a broad range of different subjects, because once all us pre-internet born people die out it’ll only be people growing up with the internet, so no useful comparison will be available.
I would say the good strongly outweighs the bad.
It’s analogous to free speech which allows some morons and bigots to propagate nonsense but also massively accelerates the creation of knowledge and culture. The Internet after all is basically speech, broadly defined. Free speech eliminates political barriers to speech whereas the Internet largely eliminates economic and technological barriers to speech.
You make it sound as though Political Correctness is a person somewhere, scheming to take away your free speech. I knew it was a conservative bogeyman but I didn’t think it was an actual bogeyman.
You have always had the right to yell about whatever nonsense you wanted to on a street corner.
Nonsense. Trailers are marketing, not part of the cinematic work.* If trailers reveal something that makes the narrative or thematic impact markedly different for someone who sees them, versus someone who just watches the film, that seems pretty much the definition of a spoiler.
- Generally speaking. I know there have been a very few cases where trailers and other elements of marketing have been used in artistically deliberate ways, but usually this has involved misdirection and subversion of expectations. Not just showing people the big thing that’s going to happen, as is virtually standard now.
I’m going to speculate that it’s very probable that any of the various waves of Bubonic Plague were worse than the internet.
Who is old enough to remember using the Magazine Index Guide for reports? I’ve read one history major* who says that Google Books has really widened their ability to mine old publications for information. The MI Guides could only list search results for a limited number of keywords. GB can search for any keyword, and call the documents right up.
*She was researching character traits attributed to hair color in the 1800s.
It is not done happening yet, it is still very young!
I went to university the first time in 1985 where I stood in line for hours in the rec centre to sign up on poster board for classes which were invariably not the profs you wanted while trying to juggle your class schedule with a pencil and eraser. Researching for papers had me spending hours, if not days, combing through journals and books that, might or might not, have relevant information or be up to date which I could then laboriously transcribe to a word processor or one of the campus Macs, if I could grab time on them.
When I applied for my classes in 2007, I signed in from home and had my application and classes signed up for in twenty minutes. Researching for papers through the University library system gave me access to every journal and book in digital and analog formats which I could copy and paste or ocr and scan into my paper that I completed and sent to my prof or TA’s account in the space of a few hours.
The down side is that any mouth breather with an opinion and web access can pollute my screen. The price you pay for having the knowledge of the world at your fingertips is that some of it is really not nice at all.
I dunno, as a person with autism the Internet’s been great for speaking my mind, but in a lot of ways I think it’s been kind of bad for the world. Sometimes I feel like selling it off to corporations was a bad idea and they should have kept it a public medium for the purpose of education and research.
Computers are tools and tools can be used for good or bad things. Overall I think the Internet is an unparalleled achievement in human existence.
For you, I’m thinking sysadmin might not be the right career path to pursue, particularly when it sounds like you might have to start at the bottom and work your way up.
Heh, Disqus login required. :smack:
Good one! I first did this in 1969 at a relatively small, rich school. Registration was like getting something from the DMV, except less efficient and the people were less friendly. I went to grad school at a huge state university and I was sure glad that we got to go to special lines. My kids could register in advance from home.
Worth the price of the net right there if you ask me.