Five views about the Internet
Here are five views about the internet by Charles Leadbeater and my thoughts.
1. Just a Tool
I understand how this idea about the internet makes sense to a lot of people. The part about it being the same as we have always done before is true, why would humans create something that we couldn’t relate to? Everything is always a step up, something better and that is important. Ebay being an overblown fleamarket is better and it is exciting! It is natural for us to get overly excited by something new, which is why I agree with the next point:
2. Big, but Becoming Dull
The excitement will wane, and then you’ll know the internet has either gone, or (more likely) it is under the surface of everyday life. When this happens I think the effect will be subtle, people will be using the Internet without realising it. This already happens to an extent, but the people who are using the internet everyday stand out now because it isn’t yet common for everyone to have smart phones or similar devices that are always online.
3. big but BAD
There are three reasons why some people see the internet as bad:
1. killing experts & professionals - mass amateurism
2. dependency on web - eroding independent thought - dumbing down
3. eroding privacy & identity
Everything that occurs will have opposition of some kind, and these views can also be countered by opposing arguments. I think the main point here is that although jobs and other things may be lost in the change, new opportunities will be opened up for the new generation of people leaving university in the coming years. For instance, the job of photo journalist may no longer be a good career choice with all the amateur photographers on phones taking a lot of of the work, but the job of managing this content didn’t exist before the Internet.
4. big and getting bigger FAST
The Internet is growing faster and faster as a useful tool. There are choices open to a lot of people that didn’t exist before. If you want a free blog there isn;t one good option, there are several. Even with Google seemingly controlling the market space for most tools, there are viable and good alternatives everywhere you look. This freedom of choice and the ability to connect to people actually do good things?
As an example I can refer to the reddit community that I am a part of has pulled together and helped people out of awkward situations before, sometimes even with actual donations. The problems occur when you realise that you can never be 100% sure who someone is on the Internet. The larger the Internet becomes I think the easier it is to exploit people and get away with it by becoming lost in the masses of similarly occurring cases.
5. big, good - could become bad
The people who view the current self-organistion of the Internet as only a phase would say that it requires a traditional control method in the future as it gets bigger and bigger. Having this structure, either by paid for access or a governmental control scheme will bring more problems that it is trying to solve. In many ways this can already be seen from examples like China’s Internet filtering system. Even though those measures are in place there will always be ways to circumvent the barriers put in place and chaos to resume.
I believe the Internet should stay a neutral playing field, and be freely available to everyone to allow them to have a voice. A large part of the power of the Internet is that it is neutral, and introducing a paid for access to certain services would exclude a lot of people.
The Internet can already be seen as polluted, and it is not hard, especially with search engines getting better and better at sorting data, to find what you are looking for within this pollution so I do not believe more control is needed in the ways that are suggested.
Owing a knife gives you the option to do many things, but it they are not crippled by being made blunt or non-sharp just to stop people from killing other people with them. The people committing the offences should be prosecuted, not everyone with a blanket control measure.
It is interesting that we talk about THE internet, one internet. It wasn’t always like that, for example Compuserve and AOL started as walled off parts of the world wide web.
