I’ve been pondering this morning how the use of the internet has (or may have) changed my life. As a child/teen during the web’s infancy, I was blissfully unaware that so many lifes/careers/relationships would be enabled or changed as a result of the interactions it might facilitate. I hadn’t even heard of google prior to arriving at university and two years prior to that had never had internet access anywhere locally.
I am sure my behaviour today would be pretty different if the web wasn’t around due to the massive impact its had in my world view. It seems a far smaller place and more tightly coupled. I feel free to drop messages to strangers and write blog posts into the ether. I won a T4 competition in my early uni years which landed me a car and £4k richer, which I wouldn’t have entered if I’d had to phone – so I’d definitely be poorer. There are however, examples where the use of the web has had a detrimental effect on particular individual lives.
It’s a huge one to think about. Would my life be better as a result of the web having not been so widely adopted in the way it has? Would yours?
#1 by Howard Dickins at February 16th, 2009
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The web has definitely benefited me in some big ways – although of course it’s difficult or impossible to tell what ‘would have happened’… To a degree it has been just a matter of scale… I have no problem looking stuff up in books (it’s just slower) I can use a telephone to communicate – but email is somehow so much easier for many tasks. But I love the way that the web builds a form of community and I’m sure we’re richer for it. I’m sure that online community is not supplanting real-world community – late 80’s early 90’s was not particularly known for its high levels of community in the real world – it was pretty disfunctional back then too.
On a related theme: over the weekend I heard Baroness Susan Greenfield (the famous brain scientist) talking on Radio-4 wondering about the effects of modern culture & technology on our brains. Specifically the rise of attention-disorders but also the possible lack of empathy-building in childhoods where gaming has supplanted book-reading. (She was keen to point out that there is little or no research on these things but expressed how much we need to do that research.)
My own experience tells me that I use the web in a different way from my sons: I do *lots* of reading on the web and I have little patience for watching youtube videos.
Whereas my son Josh (13) uses youtube to learn guitar but probably has little patience with reading hugely long articles.
So we use the ‘net differently… It it because of a radical difference in how our brains have developed – becasue of technology – to be honest I don’t know. But it is plausible.