An ambitious topic, yes, I know.
It's true I am no Doctorow.
But hey, why not? I'll give it a shot,
For it's a topic on which I've thought. (Much?)
The meter's off. So sue me. It's not the main topic of today.
Anyways, teh interwebs. The glorious glorious interwebs. That is the topic of today.
I'm not going to start with what the internet is or how to use it because I'm going to assume you have some basic understanding of both those topics, simply because you are reading these words.
The Topic I'm going to tackle is a little more ambitious and ambiguous. Is the Internet a good thing?
Many people will say that it is not. Many of those are parents talking to kids, telling them to go outside and get some goddamn air. Most of those parents are lying. They think the internet is great and convenient and easy. They just wish you wouldn't be on it all the fucking time.
There are people with some actually relevant concerns. Among them is Jaron Lanier, a man who seriously looks like he smokes pot eight days a week (and would be okay with that last phrase because he'd be so baked he couldn't remember how many days there were in a week). He also known as the father of virtual reality, spends some time at Columbia occasionally as a visiting scholar and a bunch of other stuff that you really don't think he'd be able to do high.
One of his concerns is about the hive mind of the Internet. So much quantity overrides any quality that is there. The sheer mass of mediocrity simply outweighs any good that might come about. Another is simply the idea that the internet, more specifically social networking sites make people into words. You become a simple combination of name, age, schools attended, job, not a complex breathing person.
A third concern is regarding things like Wikipedia. It's a good idea in theory. Allowing the sum of human knowledge to coalesce into one perfect encyclopedia.
But according to Lanier, this doesn't work. One of his concerns is that it removes the touch of the real author of the information, the man who experience and/or researched the actual information. The majority of the information on Wikipedia is from books, written by people who have only read of the experiences not lived them. What is present on Wikipedia is sterile information, information separate from experience, information lacking insight and interpretation. Subtlety and context is lost in the process of some reader reading the work and putting it up on Wikipedia. In addition, a false sense of authority is present, simply because the information is up on an "official" work. A reader's own bias is accepted wholesale with the information of the authors he cites.
Another problem is anonymity, a problem most on the Internet have encountered time and again. Anonymity is the ultimate shield against repercussion, or so some believe. Behind the mask of perceived safety, trolls can do terrible things, simply because they know it will never be pinned to them. Gratuitous insults, racism, and other horrible deeds. One woman, a blogger named Kathy Sierra. She "had images of her as a sexually mutilated corpse posted prominently, apparently in hopes that her children would see them." (quote from Jaron Lanier's book, "You Are Not a Gadget.", though it should be noted he is not the only one who has expressed this concern.)
For people who don't subscribe to the idea that all friendliness and niceness is a direct result of accountability to the victims, there is another similar explanation. Human beings are not made to think abstractly. We're used to seeing people, feeling them. Even over the phone, we hear voices. But people we've never seen, people we'll never know, people we'll never meet again, people who will probably never ever talk to us, well, they aren't totally real, are they? It's a difficult thing to see text on a screen and turn that into a real living breathing human being. Even if we know that intellectually, we can't completely believe it, and that affects the way we act profoundly.
Even in my own personal experience, I've seen this happen. I have friends who, perfectly personable in real life and some of the best people ever, go on Omegle for fun just to mess with people's heads, and say it's okay because they're "just messing around." I honestly don't get it, but I guess that's just me.
One other concern, still to do with anonymity, is less negative but also worrying. It is the idea that people can not have meaningful relationships through the Internet, and that people too often mistake relationships on the Internet for the real thing. This concern goes deep into the heart of human relations. What do we need to have a "meaningful" relationship? What does meaningful even mean? There are two concerns here. The first is simply that there is no contact. There is so much more to human conversations than just the words you speak. There is the body language conversants display, the sound of their voice, even their smell. Many believe that such factors are completely necessary to meaning in human relations and will never be incorporated into the Internet. Another factor is the absence of risk. What kind of relationship can you have when you can make the other person go away by literally just hitting a button? There is no real change to you, no mistakes you will have to live with. And without risk, there is nothing. Nietzsche (and I'm paraphrasing) said, "Build your colonies on volcanoes, sail your ships on uncharted seas." Only with risk can something life-changing be achieved, and on the internet there is no risk.
Anyways, this post is getting a little long and I have things I must do. So I think I'll leave it with these problems for now and respond to them tomorrow. Or some other time. VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: I don't actually subscribe to the beliefs I posted above (or indeed, any of them at all) and will in fact be countering the majority of them with counterarguments. Just not right now.
