On the Internet: Why All the Problems I Talked about Last Time are Stupid and Dumb.

I lied.

I forgot one Problem in the last post, so the real title of this should be On the Internet: Yet Another Problem with the Internet and Why it and All Aforementioned Problems are Stupid and Dumb.

Between lying and having such an absurdly ridiculous title, the choice was obvious.

Anyways, the last problem goes something like this: The Internet kills creativity. The proponents of this theory are a little iffy on how exactly, but they're very sure on one thing. Internet kills imagination. They cite things like AMV, anime music videos. People take clips from an anime and they play them with music. There are literally millions of them. Seriously, if you go to youtube and search the letters AMV, you will get so many results that Youtube will merely say "millions" instead of a number. Lanier and many others, especially those supporters of copyright say that there is no creativity in AMV's. You merely take clips of an anime someone else made and put it to music someone else made, and voila. You have an AMV. Yet the Internet is constantly churning these out by the hundreds. People make these, and then they tell themseles they've actually created something, but they really haven't. They have done nothing original, nothing to be proud of. Yet they've spent time they could be using to do something actually creative to do this activity.

In addition, people supposedly become dependent on the Internet. Not in the World-of-Warcraft-I-need-my-daily-dose-or-I-will-freak-out-and-hit-you-with-a-chair way (or at least not necessarily) but in more of a, hey, this is convenient way. How many times have you been working on some problem near your computer when you suddenly realize that, "Hey, the answer to this problem is right over there on the Internet. I can Google it and not have to think at all!" (Okay, the exact phrasing could be better. But you get the general sentiment.) The Internet is EATING YOUR BRAIN.

Or so they say.

And now we finally get to what I said was the topic of this post. Why Those Problems are Bullshit.

Let's start with the ones from the last post. To summarize in a handy-dandy list:

-Quantity is killing Quality
-Social Networking sites reduce people to just mere words.
-Wikipedia is overrated. Its writers are not the authorities themselves. The authorities' own views are skewed by the writers'
-TROLLS
-No personal investment on the Internet between people.

Just for fun, I'm going to start with the ones I just wrote down before going back. Simply because they're fresher in your minds. It should be noted now that I'm not going into a really in-depth rebuttal because doing that would require more time than I have.

Regarding AMV's, who the hell says they're not creative? Here's something made just with clips and some autotune.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWRyj5cHIQA
If that isn't creative, I don't know what is. And for those purists out there who argue that autotune is cheating, here's something else.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUZIE78ZK_A
A little repetitive, but he didn't have much to work with.

The people who made this might have used segments from the works of others, but they definitely created something new and different. What they made is not something anybody else could have thought up and created.

On the subject of the dependence on the Internet, the same argument could just as easily be made for textbooks, reading, or speech. People who use them are too lazy to just figure things out for themselves, and instead depend on outside sources to do their work for them. The Internet is a tool like any other. How people use it doesn't reflect on its quality. That would be like some lazy dude who looks up the answers in the back of the book reflects on the quality of the textbook.

Now on to the problems I mentioned before.

-Quantity killing Quality

There's a very complicated rebuttal to this, but I think I can lay down the bare bones. The idea is that Quantity creates Quality. What the Internet does for many people is to reduce the price of failure to zero. For instance, let's take blogging itself. Blogging costs people nothing more than they already pay for getting on the Internet. So you end up with a shitton of crappy blogs that peter out after a few posts (I have yet to show this particular blog to be above that standard, though I'm working on it) with a few really big blogs with thousands of readers. (I should also write that I'm only considering blogs written by people who were made famous by the blog, not the other way around. So Oprah's blog doesn't count.) This, at first seems to be an argument that helps the idea that Quantity is burying quality. But consider this: Some of those people who now have thousands of readers from all over the world would never have gotten their exposure otherwise. Because the price of trying (and, for many, failing) is virtually zero, people who might never have tried writing a blog now get the opportunity. When you combine that with the fact that there are automatic filters that filter out good and bad (Someone subscribes to your blog, your blog gets more screen hits, then it shows up more prominently on Google. The more prominently it shows up on Google and other searches, the more people subscribe and the more screen hits you get, and on. On a side note, you should subscribe to this blog. Just sayin) True, there's a really large quantity, but that means there's more quality available, and, with the right algorithms and things like Facebook "likes", well, quality will out.

There're many more examples and comparisons, among them Flickr and some other internet sites. But I'm essentially writing multiple essays in a single blog post, so I'm trying to keep it down.

-Social networking reduces people to "just" words.

If you couldn't tell from the quotation marks (and you probably could, if you meet the already exacting standards I mentioned before.) I really have a problem with "just" words. I think words are amazing. Saying something is just a word is like saying Chuck Norris is just Chuck Norris. Words are shadows of our world, shadows of reality that extend into and affect reality. They have only as much meaning as the reader gives it, and so much more. When I say, "I am a writer." I'm not labeling myself or limiting myself, I'm describing myself, showing you one aspect of the complex being that is I. (That is me? Something like that.)

-Wikipedia is overrated.

These are entirely valid problems. (For the problems specifically, go back to the last post.) But those problems last only as long as the original authorities don't actually edit Wikipedia themselves. One of the major reasons that leaders of their subjects don't write on Wikipedia is because they still suffer from the stigma of nonliterary sources. Many of them feel that anything bound and written is somehow superior to electronic data.

But that's going to change. I know a grad student at Columbia, really awesome guy with a really awesome hat who loves editing Wikipedia pages on his area of research, philosophy of the mind, especially as it relates to technology. This guy has talked to some of the leading minds in his field including John Searle, a very influential man in the idea of computers and consciousness. And, in all likelihood, he's going to become a leading philosopher himself.

And he's not that strange. People of our generation and the one a little before us have no problem with Wikipedia. And these are the people who will become the leading minds in their fields. In a couple decades, people who do the research will be putting it up on Wikipedia. The current problem is just that, only a current problem.

-Trolls. By far the most troubling. Trolls are a seriously problem on the Internet. My best response is that the Internet is again a tool. We see trolls more on the Internet, but they exist without it too. Cow-tipping, mindless graffiti (I have nothing but respect for those who make real art with spray paint. But some people just spray to deface things), TPing, all are malicious deeds from bored teenagers that injure from behind the shield of anonymity. Trolling does not originate from the Internet. The Internet is just a tool.

-No Meaningful Relationships through the Internet

This is one of the more complicated problems. It's filled with hypotheticals. For example, what if we learn to connect all our senses to the internet? What if we created virtual worlds we could beam our minds in to, through which we could talk to people across the globe as if we were beside them?

I'm going to try and stay away from those. What I can talk about a little is telepresence and Asperger's. Telepresence is the idea that you can be where you aren't. (Yes, there are better ways to phrase that, but I really wanted to say it that way.) It's the idea that you can be genuinely represented somewhere other than your physical body is not. So Skype is a form of telepresence. But there's more than just video-chatting. There is now a shirt that allows people to text hugs. Simply text something to a certain number, and the shirt will tighten in certain places to simulate a hug. Apparently it's very realistic. But devices like that sweatshirt could eventually simulate all of the so called necessary aspects of meaningful human interactions.

Yeah, that was a could. I stray into hypothetical-land. So instead of venturing deeper, I shall talk about Asperger's. I have several friends with this disorder. It's a type of autism that messes with your reading of social cues, emotions and body language (or that's one of the major symptoms at least.) These people are actually more comfortable chatting online, since it lets them see everything that the other participant in the conversation sees, instead of one side being able to read body language and the other not.Yet if it is true that things like body language are essential to meaningful human interaction, does that mean that people with Aspergers don't have any meaningful interactions?

(If you couldn't tell, I'm answering that question with a no.) It seems to me that we're getting too invested in our observations and we're not looking at cause and effect. Just because many meaningful social interactions have body language and other things that can't be put into text doesn't mean that the body language cause social interaction. That would be like saying that, since squares and rectangles both have all right angles and they are both quadrilaterals, all quadrilaterals must have right angles. You're missing out on some of the most awesome-sounding shapes in geometry, the parallelogram (say that ten times fast) and the rhombus (Which I am convinced sounds like some sort of vehicle). In the same way, there could be meaningful interaction without the constrictions suggested.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to wax romantic for a second (It happens at times. I am a cynic merely by inclination, and a romantic at heart.) Feel free to skip to the end of the blog post if you find such things nauseating.

Even if they are right, that meaning can not be found through bits and bytes, I don't think that it's a waste of time to try to relate to others on the Internet. Even if you know you'll fail, sometimes, when the goal is bright and beautiful, you need to go ahead and try anyways. And it is a beautiful idea. Two people, out of six billion and change, separated by countries and culture, who have never met and may never meet, who may have nothing in common, or everything, actually connecting and become meaningful factors in each others lives, even if only as a pen pal. Isn't that a beautiful idea?

Isn't that an idea worth spending a little time and effort on?

(For all you people who decided to skip the gooey parts, here's me ending the blog post. Not sure what I'm going to write about next. If you have any suggestions, there's a link to a suggestion box at the top.)