Is the internet a good or a bad thing?

There is a clever pair of adverts for AOL on the television here in the UK at the moment - one portraying the internet as a good thing the other as a bad thing.

Some time ago I got to meet Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, and to hear him being interviewed. When asked whether he thought. looking back over the last thirty years, the internet had been a good or a bad thing his responses was "It is just a thing. Whether it is good or bad depends what you do with it. If you don't like what you are doing with it then it is simply a reflection of what you are as an individual, an organisation or a society and that is what you have to fix"

This was why I got into blogging all of those years ago. If the internet is going to be a good thing we have to be in there making it good. Like society we have to take part, stand up and say what we think, and behave in ways that will make the internet somewhere where our kids can learn, grow and connect with each other and not somewhere where the darker side of life prevails.

Comments

[Christine]

Well, i totally agree with you. Yes internet, just like other media is just a thing. Whether it's good for us or not depending on how we treat it and how we use it. :)

[Mark Harmer]

Neighbours of mine are proud of the fact they don't have a TV - they clearly think it's a "bad thing". I think that's a bit like being proud of not having books in the house. The question of good and bad is totally contextually-dependent.

I remember that AOL campaign. I dismissed it at the time as just a stupid question - but at the same time, very clever marketing. It certainly irritated me enough to get sucked into the debate.

[Lemmy Morton]

The internet is definitely a bad for the liberal arts. Also, in lieu of promoting diversity, it is actually creating a homogeneity underlying all american life. What we need here is more regionalism, like New Orleans, which is slowly loosing its wonderful heritage, in part due to factors like the internet. Cell phones were bad, but the internet is worse for cultural diversity. Technology is slowly making us all think and talk alike. In the end, the internet is robbing us of what is most important in life. I am very concerned about the negative ramifications to art and music that the internet is slowly but surely bringing about.

[Mark Harmer]

Lemmy, people made the same case against radio when we started our national services here in the United Kingdom - that a homogeneity would reign and that regional accents would die out. That didn't happen.

My personal experience of the internet is one of increased cultural diversity. I've had 1:1 conversations which I'd never otherwise experience in my very small rural village here in a part of England.

In terms of the arts, communities such as YouTube offer a means of individual artists expressing themselves in a way not easily possible when "the media" was represented by big corporates and those people were the arbiters / gatekeepers of what people were allowed to experience.

I think people made the same arguments about opera being the death of spoken theatre, of radio being the death of newspapers.

Of course everything is in a state of transition (New Orleans will be under water in the next hundred years, for example) but my experience of the internet is that it brings about connection. Yes, it's also a great leveller, but rather than being a "good thing" or a "bad thing", that is just "how it is". It's an enrichment, an addition. I don't think it's replacing or destroying anything.

[zane]

I think the internet is a good thing, with all the websites you can go on is jst unlimited.....

The internet has never been a bad thing in my eyes and probably never will be....

its qaulity