I've spent a lot of this year listening to people bewildered by the genesis of a new information age that people are frantically struggling to wrangle in, take control of, and predict its outcome.
In my mind, its all premature, a poke at what may or may not come. Some people cry that it will be the death of language as we know it. Others fear the social monstrosity the internet can be, destroying the lives of unwilling teenagers either through humiliation or being arrested at sixteen for the distribution of child pornography. Others just want a sweet piece of this monetary leviathan, filling dreams of wealth and prosperity.
What we have to remember, either looking at our children or watching other children deal with this mass influx of access to more information in an hour that a person 20 years ago would not have encountered in a lifetime, that everyone is lost. China is suffering from an epidemic of internet addiciton, affecting more of its citizens than there are people in the United States. What everyone is forgetting, however, is that not only is this information age in its early stages.
Regardless of age, more people than ever are exposed to the random and unforgiving etiquettes and memes of the internet. Whether they are a 14 year old girl or a 45 year old business executive, its the first time they have ever encountered a social setting completely different from what exists int heir day to day lives.
I'm twenty seven. My first time connecting to the internet was twenty years ago through prodigy. It took me and several others like me a long time to come to terms with how best to approach the social aspects and brutal honesty the internet subjects a person to. I imagine it will take society forever to fully sort out this mess, until chldren can be guided through it all by knowledgeable parents without having to discover it themselves. In the mean time, just like I always tell people who are distraught over something someone on facebook did to them. "Relax, its just the fucking internet. But if you want, I can put you in touch with a guy in Thailand who can hack the living shit out of her facebook page for you."
~Brian Walker
I hate the internet. It was supposed to be an information superhighway, but the majority of the information is biased or wrong altogether. I don't have facebook or any of those things, not because i'm above it, but because it just seems to complicate things. Social interaction is mostly visual. Why people are choosing to rob themselves of normal productive interaction is beyond me. I understand the benefits social sites give their members, but i don't understand why ease of access has begun to dominate real personal relationships. My brother met his wife online, and it turned out that they fit very nicely together, but from both of their accounts, neither of them is what the other expected. I think it is more exciting and a better atmosphere to walk up to some person you don't know in a bar than to meet someone at Starbucks after weeks of online interaction only to find that the person in front of you isn't what you had imagined at all. It's better to build an understanding of a person than to change your understanding of a person.
ReplyDeleteD. Ryan