41–50 of 102 posts
One thing that the internet has removed is the endless debates / discussions / disagreements between friends and family about different facts. We just now google the facts and the argument is over as soon as it starts.
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Access to information has been a double edged sword as well. I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time. E…
Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page. I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Access to information has been a double edged sword as well. I am one of the pre-internet oldies and recall how you had to go to the library, and find the book on the topic you wanted to research. It was a case of hoping it was there and not loaned out already, or too old an edition. Quite often, it would already be loaned out, and you had to wait a week or two and then go back, hoping it had been returned on time. E…
Now everyone see's themselves as an informed authority, after a few minutes googling and reading a wikipedia page. I think today's self-proclaimed informed authority compares pretty well to yesterday's hobbyists, at least. Access to information today is just so much better than it used to be. I've got a passing interest in ancient history, and I own a number of books, but I'm hardly an expert. This morning I watched…
I think the more meaningful difference is life before and after mobile phones. This is one of those technologies that changes everything , and it's why mobile phone penetration far exceeds internet penetration -- although smartphones are rapidly closing the gap. As a trivial example, consider meeting a friend. Before, you used to agree on a time and place, and if they didn't show up you had no way of knowing if they…
I disagree somewhat and it's possible the disagreement depends on how we slice up the time ranges of "mobile phone" and "internet".
The "internet" divided into 2 periods:
pre- www internet: 1980s text based, Usenet, government and universities:
post- www internet: 1990s graphics on webpages, google, wikipedia, amazon
The "mobile phones" divided into 2 periods:
"dumb phones" pre 2007 of Motorola/Nokia
"smart phones" post 2007 in the iPhone/Android world
Thinking back to 2006, the internet changed daily life much more meaningfully than mobile phones. When I got the "dumb phone" in the 1990s that cost 70 cents a minute, it didn't change my daily life the way Google/Wikipedia/Amazon did. To this day, I probably do 20+ queries on google.com every single day. I hardly interact with my iPhone and I don't install apps on it. In 1998, I remember booking a plane ticket online (the fancy new "e-ticket") from Southwest Airlines and it seemed magical when the gate agent let me board the plane even though I hadn't spoken to a single human being. I'd agree that pre-1990s internet of dialing up into BBS's and chatting on Usenet felt more like a toy than a necessity of life.
I'm guessing the folks favoring "mobile phones" as more life-changing than the internet are thinking of post-2007 smartphones. (But I'd argue part of what makes smartphones "smart" is the internet.)
If society were forced to choose, I'm confident most would rather have full internet with no mobile phones rather than 100% mobile phone coverage and zero internet infrastructure. Since both technologies grew up together, we can only entertain though experiments about which technology is more meaningful to humanity.
I used to "go for a walk" many evenings and drop coins into the pay phone around the corner to talk to these people. Or, arrive home from school with the greatest expectation if I thought there might be a letter waiting for me. I think there is still a drawer full of these teenage missives in my mother's house.
I left home at 18 and travelled to the other side of the world for a year. This was 1992. No mobile phones and certainly no consumer Internet to speak of. I'd call my family maybe once a month and I think I wrote about a dozen letters the whole time. After returning to my birth country, for the next 12 months I think I wrote even more letters to those I'd met abroad.
By 1994 I was running up massive phone bills connecting to BBSs on a 2400 baud modem.
I remember the first graphic I ever downloaded from the Internet was a picture of the Louvre. I used Slipknot.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SlipKnot_%28web_browser%29
1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips).
2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write).
3. Concurrent (multiple communication going on in at the same time).
4. Persistent and context preserving (meaning, if you come back to the communication later today, tomorrow, in a week, in a year, it's still there)
5. Searchable.
6. Immediate, yet synchronous (meaning, your messages arrive instantly, but (and this is a social convention) you don't have to reply directly if you don't want to hence you have time to think).
7. Mediated (meaning: not face-to-face; although a weak form of face-to-face is available via video).
9. Global (meaning that there are no geographic restrictions as to whom we communicate with).
This is a fairly dramatic change.
To give but one example of how dramatic a change this is, let's look at something this new form of communication has changed quite a bit: courtship. In the past one typically courted only one person at a time, or maybe 2-3 if adventurous. Aided by social media in general and platforms like Grindr/Tinder in particular, it's now possible to court large numbers of (potential) partners at the same time, dozens, quite possibly hundreds. Some even automate parts of their courtship process: chat-bots, A/B testing of photos and openers, GPS spoofing to target specific geographic locations (e.g. for pipelining before travelling).
I can imagine somebody in the 1400s talking about being the last generation to remember life before books, and what a freeing time it was where people actually had to talk with each other to get information.
I was reflecting on this the other day. How do we communicate now? What are the key features of how we communicate that were not available before. Maybe it's the combination of the following. 1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips). 2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write). 3. Concurrent (multiple communication going…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Being one of those pre-internet era kids who started out with a C64, I don't think so. Not having a company and private mobile phone wouldn't change anything to me. I rarely use it and the company can call my cable phone at home when I'm not in the office (where mobiles don't work due to the architects fail). When I'm not at home and not in the office, I'm in the car where I'm forbidden by the employer to use any mea…
I doubt your skills are so specific to the internet that you would be unemployable in a universe without it.
Not that I don't see what you're saying, but there are a lot of us out here who've built careers around the Internet which are, at the very least, far better than any other prospect that might've been available to us. Certainly in my own case - absent the Internet, I'm nothing but a mouthy unlettered redneck with no meaningful prospects beyond maybe doing menial lab work for the local university, earning maybe $10k a year over the local median in exchange for a lifetime of daily health risks and all the nonsense that goes with being staff in an academic environment.
Don't get me wrong - I'm still a mouthy unlettered redneck, either way. But in a world where the Internet is a thing, I'm a mouthy unlettered redneck who is unaccountably able to earn a very good living for himself, enough so that he can not only support himself in comfortable style but help look after family back home who weren't so fortunate, including the distant cousin who nearly died when his meth lab blew up.
So while I'm not wholly unsympathetic to commentary like the Quartz author's, I find myself forced to take it with a grain of salt. Sure, the current situation is not ideal. There are a lot of things that could change for the better. Healthier habits around mobile devices. A more conscious understanding of the effect the Internet has on perception. Facebook burned to the ground, the ground salted, and the ashes buried under a crossroads at midnight. All kinds of things.
There are also a lot of people out here like me for whom life in a world with even the Internet we have is vastly better than the best lives we'd be able to make for ourselves in a world without. I think that's something worth keeping in mind in a conversation like this. But then, of course, I suppose I'd almost have to think so, wouldn't I?
I was reflecting on this the other day. How do we communicate now? What are the key features of how we communicate that were not available before. Maybe it's the combination of the following. 1. Written, using language++ (by this I mean we communicate primarily by conventional writing, enhanced with emoticons, photos, audio clips). 2. Lightweight (it's no effort to write). 3. Concurrent (multiple communication going…
Pre-Internet, the only writing I ever did was when encouraged by parents (such as to penpals I didn't really want anyway) or for schoolwork. I suspect this would have been true for most. And written English was a more formal mode of the language that barely reflected day to day conversations at all.
Now, the amount of reading and writing that almost all of us are doing on a daily basis is staggering. In this comment alone I've "written" more than I'd have written for entertainment in most years of my childhood. Informal, day to day language is now fine in writing, a whole new slang culture has appeared, and everyone is sharing their thoughts more directly in a way we could have never anticipated (for good and bad) - it's excellent and I'm so glad I got to see it happen.