I Love It, I Love It Not,…
Somewhere in the back of my head, I’ve been suffering from some kind of ambivalence about the Internet. And since just about the only possible (long, long term) social benefit of my research I can come up with is that some day, years from now, it will make the Internet faster, I thought I should get to the bottom of it. So here goes:
Things I like about the Internet (in random order)
- Looking up articles online– much faster than when I had to go find them in the library.
- It’s much easier to find/apply for colleges, grad schools, jobs… remember when you had to look up these things in books or newspapers?
- Keeping in touch with friends
- It’s easy to look up opening and closing times of stores, addresses on Google maps,…
- I can figure out what to do with my cardoon (that’s a vegetable) in seconds
- Wikipedia. cool.
- Craigslist
- Reading New York Times Sunday magazine and the New Yorker
- My blog
Bad stuff about the Internet
- pedophiles, stalkers, etc.
- 419 scams (which are allegedly fueling the growth of the Internet infrastructure in Nigeria, by the way)
- 80% of Internet content is porn
- with the Web comes Addictive Web Surfing
- MySpace still creeps me out
- The kids I teach have a really short attention span and I am blaming it on the Web.
- Stream-of-consciousness blogging
Hmm… so, in summary: the Internet has hugely increased our quick and easy access to a huge range of information, breaking down geographical barriers. The cost is a slight loss in the meaning of time and space– instead of reading the New York Times every Sunday morning in that coffee shop 4 blocks over, I can read it any time I like from my own sofa, with the danger of losing hours to unchecked surfing. The Internet has also hugely increased our ease of communication– with a slight cost of making life easy for all the stalkers/perverts/identity thiefs out there. The Internet has enabled self expression, self-publishing– with a slight cost of an increase in content-less content. But I guess if I’m not that interested in stream-of-consciousness blogs, I don’t actually have to read them.
So, OK, the Internet is a good thing. Phew!
