Comments on: How has web use changed your life? http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/2009/02/15/how-has-web-use-changed-your-life Wootten's Weblog Sat, 31 Jul 2010 00:19:08 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 By: Howard Dickins http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/2009/02/15/how-has-web-use-changed-your-life/comment-page-1#comment-39549 Howard Dickins Mon, 16 Feb 2009 09:28:24 +0000 http://www.ianwootten.co.uk/?p=308#comment-39549 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. 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.

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