I was thinking about this yesterday and wanted to get your thoughts. There are, obviously, good and bad things about the internet, so what do you see as good and bad? What is your final verdict, on whole, good or bad? I hope to keep this going and adding and subtracting and changing our opinions as we go. Shout out to Al Gore for inventing the internet for us!
The good is that information can be passed almost instantaneously, the bad is that information can be passed almost instantaneously! With the ability to do so from a device that most folks have in their pocket at all times and that they subscribe to programs that connect them to hundreds if not thousands of “friends” thoughts and opinions can spread in seconds. Many years ago before the advent of cell phones and 'social media' I read of a study that took a group of people at get then to pass a message one from another and tracked the input compared with the output, what came out had very little comparison to the original input. Add to that the ability of anyone to voice their opinion or ideas into this vast echo chamber be it god, bad, accurate or total nonsense and this scares the hell out of me. Telling what is the truth from spin, particularly when reading of political activities is becoming increasingly hard, the internet is not the problem it is how it is being used by some people and groups that troubles me.
Asking whether it is a good or bad thing is like asking whether fire is good or bad, as far as I am concerned. If we are freezing , a fire is wonderful; if your house is burning down, then it is not. The same could be said about a lot of things, including the internet. That being said;I love the internet ! I like being able to search for information about anything that i want to know more about, or even just get opinions about. The internet helps keep me in touch with my friends and family, way better than the old way of writing letters because calling was expensive to do very often, or I didn’t have a phone. Now, I can take a picture, using my phone, and in 2 seconds, my daughter in the Netherlands can be looking at that picture that I just took with my phone. Now that is awesomeness ! I also love the health and safety benefits from my phone and Apple Watch. I can track my health online, send it to my doctor if I want, share results with my family, and even call for emergency help if I needed it. Like anything else, the internet can be used by bad people for bad things, and for some people it is a way to escape real life. But people doing bad things, and people escaping real life has been going on forever; way before internet, this is just the newest way for it to happen. So, overall, in my life; internet is a good thing.
One thing I noticed back in the 90s...a bunch of us at work used our personal AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) accounts, and would ping each other with work questions (which was a very efficient method to get fast answers) and with personal stuff. Then, when we would be online at home and see someone signed on to their AIM Account, we would think nothing of pinging them with a "Whazzup?" I would never pick up the phone and call a coworker during non-work hours. But being on a computer somehow negates all sorts of boundaries. The thing about it I really loathe is having all of my activities logged for use by businesses and by government. Predictably, subsequent generations have been indoctrinated to take the "What do you have to hide?" position with personal privacy. THIS is chilling...but I can see my own guard constantly being let down as familiarity takes hold.