Is Internet good for humanity?

Is Internet good for humanity?

  • I was born before 1980, internet is great

    Votes: 35 63.6%

  • I was born before 1980, internet is awful

    Votes: 10 18.2%

  • I was born after 01/01/1980, internet is great

    Votes: 9 16.4%

  • I was born after 01/01/1980, internet is awful

    Votes: 1 1.8%
  • Total voters
    55
genna

genna

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So, it’s been some 25+ years since internet had been “released “ into the wild. What’s your opinion on how it affected humanity? World-wide. Taking everything you now know into account, has it been a positive force or not?

4 choices tied to your age

Edit: I know it’s just a tool that can be used for good or bad. But I want only your overall opinion. Net positive or net negative.
 
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It wasn't the Internet that was the problem, it was the beginning of endless September.
 
Absolutely!

PS, like many here I was on the internet before there was a world wide web. I remember Slipknot and Unix shell accounts.
 
Why only extreme choices? It promotes the "fallacy of the excluded middle" (which one sees too much of on the Internet).

In reality, the Internet is used for both good and evil, and a lot of stuff in between.
 
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“Internet” covers a lot of ground. Online medical literature is good. Online porn is bad. Real information is neutral. Uninformed opinion from unvetted sources is bad. Doing this stuff at breakfast instead of reading the paper would be bad, except the paper has become worthless, so this might be neutral.
 
Yes, the internet is great. Like most things, the internet is a tool, it can be used for good or evil, just like a rock.
 
The internet has massively increased the pace of scientific research. I’m an engineering PhD student and the rapidity with which I can look up journal articles or NASA reports, sometimes going back to the 1940s is amazing sometimes. I compare that to stories from when my dad was doing his PhD and I’m amazed anyone got anything done back then. Everything took freaking forever. Don’t get me started on pre-computing scientific analyses. Frankly I don’t know how anything was built or researched before the days of CAD, FEM, CFD, and Matlab (and I say that as an experimentalist).
 
How would one survive without it.
 
genna said:
What’s your opinion on how it affected humanity?
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The internet, as artifact, has been one of history's great Force Multipliers. Analogous to the internal combustion engine, the automatic rifle, the vacuum tube, the electric motor, it made some form of power available to the poorest of individuals. Changed our politics; altered our perceptions of institutions. Sometimes, the changes and alterations were painful to experience. Mostly, the access provided to formerly arcane areas of knowledge has been a great benefit.
 
alfadog said:
Absolutely!

PS, like many here I was on the internet before there was a world wide web. I remember Slipknot and Unix shell accounts.
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Yup, cut my teeth on the internet in the mid-90's. Pine, NSCA Mosaic, telnet, FTP, USENET, the good old days Lol.

We recently had to download new firmware for an older machine we run here at work, and the vendor sent the address of the FTP site to get the download. One of my young engineers came to me and said WTF is FTP? I said, "Follow me, son, and learn of bygone days..."
 
When the first web browser came out I knew it was going to be a game changer. I’ve made a very good living from the Internet... porn included.:cool:
 
Definitely pros and cons.

The access to information and computing power is phenomenal. For those that never drove long distances with paper maps, or moved from one city to another and had to learn your way around with a paper map, it's huge. We care share our experiences with more of our friends and family, quicker and easier through social media. Photos, videos and writings about our trips, daily life and more.

There are thousands of sites like PoA where information is shared. It's incredible. People in niche hobbies can get together and share information and get advice. It is now trivial to look at the specs for an item online and see if that refrigerator will fit in the space in your kitchen or not.

AutoTrader has been around for decades, but it is sooooo much better online with filters and multiple color photos than it was in print. The same applies to other sales, such as Controller.

Unfortunately it easily allows one to only get news from sites that agree with their perspective, and get feeds from only those sites. Then people think that is the one and only view on the topic, or it further reinforces that they are "right" in their view. It also fosters more negativity in that one is "anonymous" (or at least they feel that they are) and therefore don't have their social filter on when they respond. Too often people are far more rude online than they ever would be in person. That seems to now be carrying over into their real life. See the hard divide between left and right in politics. We used to disagree, but it was largely amicable and shades of gray. Now, more and more people think it's perfectly fine to yell at "strangers" in public, or deny them access to a restaurant over differences in political views. Really? o_O One of my favorite ex-coworkers is very liberal and I'm more right of center; no, really I vote for Democrats, Libertarians and Republicans. We disagree on many political topics, but I think he's a nice guy and great at his job. If we had a position open he was interested in I'd hire him in a second.

I don't think the online porn itself is bad per se (and no, I'm not a porn watcher), but rather the access to it for kids. No, I'm not one of the "think about the children" people. It's just setting unrealistic expectations around sex and relationships with young people. Other than that I don't care.
 
Bill Jennings said:
Yup, cut my teeth on the internet in the mid-90's. Pine, NSCA Mosaic, telnet, FTP, USENET, the good old days Lol.

We recently had to download new firmware for an older machine we run here at work, and the vendor sent the address of the FTP site to get the download. One of my young engineers came to me and said WTF is FTP? I said, "Follow me, son, and learn of bygone days..."
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Hopefully you told him that FTP was "old-timey DropBox".
 
I guess I should elaborate a little here. First, I really meant commercial internet(hence "release" into the wild statement). Internet existed in educational and scientific environment long before it became commercial in the 90s. But it's ok. We can include that too.

Internet technology based on TCP/IP has provided (near)instant capability of data transfer. Massive amount of information is now at our fingertips. We can do things unimaginable even 15 years ago, let alone 30. There is no denying that it - along with mobile computing - has been the most transformational technology of the last 30 years. Benefits are endless. Really.

BUT. Costs are quite significant as well. Privacy - gone, massive government surveillance, massive commercial surveillance, ease of government censorship(China), massive concentration of informational power in the hands of few entities(commercial and governmental) , huge new monopolies. Viruses, Russians, Chinese, social media, misinformation, revolutions that accomplished nothing but killed millions. General amplification of living in the bubble. Seeming destruction of civility. List of bad things is pretty long too.

And.. of course, porn.. still the driver of the internet innovation and still the most visited sites. That one maybe on the benefits side :)

Taking all of this into account, would we have been better off if it never happen?

EDIT: I certainly would need a different carrier if there were no internet...
 
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one more thing. today's internet is not the same animal as one from late 90s and early 2000s. That wild-wild-west, everything is awesome and possibilities are endless thing is gone and buried. What we have today is a lot more concentrated and controlled. Even if you look at online shopping(goods or cars or whatever), you can see that.
 
I no longer have to look things up at the library and I no longer have to wait via the USPS for correspondence from anyone. And I wouldn't have met all you wonderful people had it not been for the internet.
 
alfadog said:
Absolutely!

PS, like many here I was on the internet before there was a world wide web. I remember Slipknot and Unix shell accounts.
Click to expand...

I remember gopher and some of the crazy stuff that you used to find down rabbit holes there.

The bad stuff has been around for a long time. The Internet has given the bad stuff a way to spread and seem mainstream. Socialism really means the government makes two skunky beers because why do more? But on the Internet, socialism becomes the savior of the planet.
 
I think the internet and social media has brought humanity to a point where we will (a lot more of us than do already) be forced to accept the reality that many of those old staid social customs from long ago were really good for us. My only hope is that we don't ride that pendulum all the way to the other extreme.
 
Please distinguish between the Internet and the Web. I'll take odds that 99.999% of the online users today will not be able to function on the Internet if the Web disappears.

Bill - don't forget gopher, IRC and so on.
 
Agreed w/most others. The access to vast resources of information and ability to collaborate has been a major boon to human advancement in innumerable ways. However, the lack of any type of information vetting/filtering to ensure some semblance of accuracy ends up supporting disinformation, which could arguably be worse than not having any of the information at all. There's not really any way to improve that without creating a "committee" to remove false information, which obviously has huge flaws of it own, and would trample on the "free speech" portion of the internet. Think overall it's a positive, but it has some huge drawbacks as well since it often encourages groupthink. I don't think the internet is really responsible for many of the changes in human interaction, that's more about how different platforms (FB, Instgram, etc.) are designed so that you just scroll through endless lists of unrelated material until you find something you want to respond to or engage with. I liken those platforms to how most used to flip through the channels or the tv guide until something showed up worth watching. The internet can be the Encyclopedia of Everything, or the biggest piece of Commercialized Propaganda ever made: your choice.
 
Enumerating the positives would seem unnecessary, and they are many. With the ability to follow directions and use a few tools, the internet makes it possible for me to fix pretty much every appliance in my house and most things on my car. Parts made of unobtanium that used to take weeks or even months to locate can now frequently be found in a few hours, and in hand in a few days. Aging parents and grandparents can see and hear their kids and grandkids faces and voices in real time every day, if they wish, regardless of geographic separation. It's a HUGE list of positives.

The negatives fall into two main issues in my view.. the increasing and overwhelming addiction/reliance on staring at a screen almost constantly, which has now replaced civil, caring, polite human-to-human interaction as the primary means of communication in our species, and the inability to do almost anything at all with government or corporate surveillance. Our recent visit to San Antonio put all of that into glaringly sharp, depressing focus.

We went to the zoo one day. I'm conflicted about zoos in the first place, but as zoos go this one was done about as well as possible. My wife asked me what my favorite animal was, to which I replied, "I like them all, but the humans were my least favorite." Everyone was oblivious to the people around them, walking into each other, talking loudly on their cell phones, kids screaming and shoving adults out of the way, adults behaving just as poorly, everyone staring at their cell phones, interested only in getting pictures of themselves in various settings rather than taking the time to actually SEE those settings, read about the animals, learn SOMETHING.. nope... ME, ME, ME, and the heck with anyone and anything around them. Made me sick. Even sicker was the behavior at the Missions we hiked to. More of the same... regardless of your religious practices, or lack thereof, at least have the decenty to realize that the Mission Concepcion is a place of great reverence to many people, has been since the 1700s, and is still an active place of worship. The loud off-color jokes, suggestive glam-selfies in front of historic depictions of Christ.... unbelievable. What does this have to do with the internet? Cell phones and the focus on "Me" completely fed by the internet in general and social media in particular.

OK... that's the "dehumanization/lack of civility" rant. Here's the other one...

Littered about downtown San Antonio are about 12,000 "scooters." "Littered" is exactly the correct word; these things are lying in the middle of sidewalks, in front of restaurants, bars, shops, walkways, streets, some standing up, some lying down. Every where you look, you trip over these things. To rent them, sort of like Uber/Lyft (more on that in a sec), you download an app, scan a code on a scooter, pay, and away you go. In doing that, you've now given a company your name, home address, location, and your track on the scooter. We took a bus once, and were still able to pay cash. That was nice... but we needed to text at the bus stop to get the schedule. Using Uber/Lyft requires similar concessions to protection of privacy. Neither my wife nor I have smart phones, but it really is getting increasingly difficult to travel without one. Every form of transportation and accommodation wants you to download an app to receive "valuable information," "Updates on your travel," etc. Yes, we still manage to get around and have a great time, but a smart phone definitely make it easier, and NOT having one is making things increasingly difficult. Why? Are companies doing this for OUR benefit, or for their bottom line (which I have no objection to.... capitalism is fine with me), or.... are we being increasingly observed and controlled? Yeah, I know that sounds tinfoilish, but seriously... there is more than a little truth to that. As a person who grew up planning trips on paper maps, looking up numbers in phone books, dialing businesses to find out schedules, purchase tickets, pay cash for hotel rooms and everything else..... this new world really feels like something out of an Orwell book. It's convenient..... and I don't like it.

Sooo.. yeah. I use the internet everyday, I can get things done faster, and I love the fact that I can find out pretty much anything at any time. As a communications medium, I absolutely hate it, and I don't like the fact that it's fast becoming the ONLY way to do business and that every bit of business and activity in your life is observable by pretty much anyone with the desire to observe it.

If I HAD to vote yea or nay, I'd have to go with nay. As a society, it's a net loss due to the dehumanization of people.
 
I've witnessed going from dial up shell access with MBOX to telling people "you suck" in 20+ languages...

It was all fun and games until the three letter people got involved...
 
I'm an elitist. I was a modemer from the BBS days.
 
The Internet in some ways might be good for humanity, but not so much on a personal level. Before the Internet I earned my PPC and my A&P license and dealt only with actual humans, face to face. Not once did I need the Internet. I purchased and rebuilt cars and motorcycles by scouring junkyards and through my network of "gear heads". I made actual friends (some lifelong) and didn't need to receive any "likes" from Internet zombies. I bicycled, played tennis, flew r/c, earned a degree etc. and never once consulted an online source.

I'm just illustrating the point that life was possible and possibly more enjoyable than what we have today. No FU's from some keyboard jock that isn't man enough to say it to your face, no 24/7 pornography available to any kid old enough to press buttons on his phone, lot more privacy, way less identity theft and no money evaporated from your banking accounts from some 14 year old hacker. I don't even want to get into the subject of people being glued to the phone at all times, even while driving....

Online forums such as POA are fun with the maturity level (at most times) allowing for intelligent conversation. If you've been into aviation for a while, most questions you already know the answer to (even medical q's!) so it's more of a fellowship of pilots forum. Very entertaining. So there was the possibility of a fulfilling life before the net and I suppose that's hard to imagine for the "screeners" that grew up with a phone in their hand. And please, GET OFF MY GRASS!
 
Take the good with the bad and I’d say yes, the internet is good.

The internet is utilized one way or another in more things than you can shake a stick at. Society as a whole would not be able to function the way it does today without it, as so many things are dependent on it.
 
Looks like a 6:1 ratio of >40 to <40 age ranges. Not sure how someone born exactly on 1/1/1980 should vote.
 
genna said:
Edit: I know it’s just a tool that can be used for good or bad. But I want only your overall opinion. Net positive or net negative.
Click to expand...


Internet itself OK. Big Brother bad. Blurring of lines between truth and falsehood bad. Internet is enabler of so much bad.
 
One positive way the internet helped me is to get my PPL. When ever I was doing anything and a idea or question popped into my head I didn't have to lug around a book I just did a google search and had tons of material to look at. It defiantly played a big part in me getting the aviation knowledge I have now.
 
Bill Jennings said:
Yup, cut my teeth on the internet in the mid-90's. Pine, NSCA Mosaic, telnet, FTP, USENET, the good old days Lol.

We recently had to download new firmware for an older machine we run here at work, and the vendor sent the address of the FTP site to get the download. One of my young engineers came to me and said WTF is FTP? I said, "Follow me, son, and learn of bygone days..."
Click to expand...

Think I got on the net around 1989 with my Tandy and a 1200 baud modem. BBS' were big back then too. Also CompuServe and Prodigy, later AOL. Plenty of crap then also. If you had a direct TCP/IP or a Unix shell then you could directly access searches like Archie, Veronica, gopher...

But yeah, like any double-edged sword, human nature is the bugaboo. But there are way more just wonderful things happening on this planet as a result of this connectivity than any downside.
 
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