Ah, the Internet. She’s such a complicated gal, ain’t she? This all-knowing lady (who’s won Miss Cyberspace for 25 years straight now) seems to have it all. With her we can telecommute, we can visit interactive libraries and go to multimedia classrooms, we can buy whatever we need or sell whatever we don’t, we can connect with all the friends we’ve ever met and do business from half a world away, we can self-publish a book of our ideas or let the world know our pithy thoughts in 140 characters.
So why does our relationship with this vast grand lady feel so sketchy at times?
Well, I found a couple guys with an opinion to share. (I’ve heard it whispered that there are so many more.) One fellow says it’s because she’s way too big and the other opines that she just offers way too little.
As far as the “too big” side of things is concerned, there’s an old article by a guy named Clifford Stoll that rolled that idea around a bit. He argued, in essence, that the problem with the Internet is that for all its many resources and instant info, it’s gotten so big that’s it’s sorta bloated and unwieldy. So it’s ultimately kind of tough to find exactly what you need. In his article, “The Internet? Bah!” he wrote:
The Internet is one big ocean of unedited data, without any pretense of completeness. Lacking editors, reviewers or critics, the Internet has become a wasteland of unfiltered data. You don’t know what to ignore and what’s worth reading.
Now, things change quickly in our online world, of course, with fine-tuned search engines and the like, but I think Stoll’s point still stands. There is indeed a vast ocean of ideas, blogs, podcasts, opines and idle chatter rushing into the Internet every single day. (The fact that you actually made it to this blog is pretty amazing, all in all.) And it can be pretty tough to process all the unsifted stuff you may find. Or want to find. Just a simple Google search for “new cars,” for example, offered me a pruned and personalized collection of, oh, 381 million results.
On the other hand, for all the connectivity of the Internet, some have said that this massive collective is far too impersonal, empty and kind of lonely.
In this creative YouTube clip, poster 1622Shimi takes a cue from Sherry Turkle’s book Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other and suggests that the Internet with its online social networks and its offer to “connect” with virtually endless numbers of friends is actually an “Innovation of Loneliness.”
[View:http://youtu.be/c6Bkr_udado:550:0]
One part of the video that really stood out to me was the narrator’s assessment of how a social network connection can do away with our need for conversation, which in turn limits our ability to have truthful friendships.
He points out that normal face-to-face conversations take place in real time, and you can’t necessarily control what or how things will be said in that environment. However, on the Internet …
Texting. Emails. Posting. All of these things let us present a self as we want it to be. We get to edit. And that means … we get to delete. Instead of building true friendships, we’re obsessed with endless personal promotion. Investing hours on end building our profile, pursuing the optimal order of words in our next message, choosing the pictures in which we look our best. All of which is meant to serve as a desirable image of who we are.
So, he suggests, we end up not being real people or real friends at all. We just project what we think makes us look best. And end up being a lonely sap with gazillions of friends. That’s an interesting and compelling take.
What do both of those complaints about our used-to-be-modem-but-now-oh-so-modern lady companion have in common? Well, a lack of flesh and blood people, I guess. On the one hand there’s no guide, no editor to sift through the Internet’s closet and say, “I don’t think you need those shoes or those, uh, 40,000,000 pages.” And on the other hand, there’s no real human contact when we go to her looking for, well, human connection. Just a lot of well-managed icons.
These guys make Miss Internet sound a little cold. Bad surfing date, I guess.
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