The Internet Is Not Harming You. Here's What's Harmful: Fearmongering About The Internet

[Lost_Wanderer]

It was 1925, and the car was destroying America’s youth. “The general effect of the automobile,” wrote Princeton University Dean Howard McClenahan, “was to make the present generation look lightly at the moral code, and to decrease the value of the home.” With a car, the youngsters could drive anywhere on Sunday. McClenahan didn’t think they’d drive to church. And if they didn’t, he argued, they’d become devilish and depraved.

This did not come to pass. Nor did phonographs create a “marked deterioration in American music,” as composer John Philip Sousa feared in 1906. Nor did the telephone “break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends,” as the Knights of Columbus warned in 1926. Nor did writing–a growing activity in the ancient world–“create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” as Plato himself hypothesized. Some 2,400 years later, the Atlantic floated the same thesis about search engines. Its headline: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Proclamations like these should remind us that every technological revolution will spawn naysayers, who for the most part should be ignored.

Source

To be frank, it’s about time somebody wrote about this. I keep getting the same phobia vibes on CAF at times. Ironically, the same folks I’ve seen bemoaning Facebook and the internet in general are among those who post here.

 

[Son_of_Niall]

… Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.

Roman poet, Juvenal

It’s never been about technology. It’s about distraction and diversion.
Always has been.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

Roman poet, Juvenal

It’s never been about technology. It’s about distraction and diversion.
Always has been.

Ah yes, distraction. It’s a word so subjective, even religion can be synonymous with it.

 

[Son_of_Niall]

Correct, all people look to be distracted. Distraction itself is not an evil. However we must ask ourselves what are we being distracted from?
Compare the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to George Orwell’s 1984:
Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New

World in the foreword of his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death. He writes:
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, Postman added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.
Journalist Christopher Hitchens, who himself published several articles on Huxley and a book on Orwell, noted the difference between the two texts in the introduction to his 1999 article “Why Americans Are Not Taught History”:
We dwell in a present-tense culture that somehow, significantly, decided to employ the telling expression “You’re history” as a choice reprobation or insult, and thus elected to speak forgotten volumes about itself. By that standard, the forbidding dystopia of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four already belongs, both as a text and as a date, with Ur and Mycenae, while the hedonist nihilism of Huxley still beckons toward a painless, amusement-sodden, and stress-free consensus. Orwell’s was a house of horrors. He seemed to strain credulity because he posited a regime that would go to any lengths to own and possess history, to rewrite and construct it, and to inculcate it by means of coercion. Whereas Huxley … rightly foresaw that any such regime could break but could not bend. In 1988, four years after 1984, the Soviet Union scrapped its official history curriculum and announced that a newly authorized version was somewhere in the works. This was the precise moment when the regime conceded its own extinction. For true blissed-out and vacant servitude, though, you need an otherwise sophisticated society where no serious history is taught.[32]

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

Correct, all people look to be distracted. Distraction itself is not an evil. However we must ask ourselves what are we being distracted from?
Compare the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley to George Orwell’s 1984:
Social critic Neil Postman contrasted the worlds of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World

I don’t think there’s much we can gain from comparing one extreme to another outside of just realizing extremes are fertilizer for clinical insanity. Different soil, same nuts grown.

 

[ClearWater]

Source

To be frank, it’s about time somebody wrote about this. I keep getting the same phobia vibes on CAF at times**. Ironically, the same folks I’ve seen bemoaning Facebook and the internet in general are among those who post here. **

FaceBook has some advantages and disadvantages. One of its, very real, disadvantages is that it has been linked with depression. This is not conjecture. This is a fact. Some people go on FaceBook, look at all the others with all these “friends” and become envious.

psychologytoday.com/blog/brick-brick/201312/are-you-risk-facebook-envy

wikihow.com/Move-Beyond-Facebook-Envy
guardianlv.com/2013/08/facebook-causes-depression-new-study-says/

Now, lots of people are able to use FaceBook without any problems, but there is a percentage of people who get genuinely envious, and depressed. It’s okay to mention this phenomenon on CAF so that people will be made aware of it.

 

[ClearWater]

The Internet has its threats. Some people will go out of their way to give your computer a virus, so care needs to be taken with that. Some people deliberately give out false information, hack computers with spyware, malware.

We’ve had people who have gone on the Internet, used it to lure children.

We’ve had people who have used it as a medium to lie. I heard there was once a case of someone claiming to be a man, putting a man’s picture, to try to get dates. Turned out to be a lesbian!

People have used it for fraud, to get personal information to in some way harm someone.

So, I don’t think alarmism to let people know that we have some people who will prey on those, to get an antivirus, not believe everything you read, and work on FaceBook envy, limiting exposure to it, if necessary.

The Internet is a tool, which can be used to great benefit of society, to teach, inform, communicate, but along with that comes its negative side. We need to just be careful, not allow the Internet to substitute our regular relationships, obsess with it, but it can be used to help us, even evangelize, as is the case with CAF.

The Internet is a tool, like a knife. A knife can be used to cut up fruit or to harm, even kill someone. That, to me, is what the Internet is like. We just need to use it responsibly and be careful is all.

 

[ClearWater]

There have been actual cases of people who have put their travel plans on FaceBook, and someone has seen that, realized the person would not be home, gone and robbed that house!

The threats and risks are real!

We shouldn’t be paralyzed with fear, because FaceBook can also help connect us. Just don’t put travel information or get too personal with the general public,

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

We shouldn’t be paralyzed with fear, because FaceBook can also help connect us. Just don’t put travel information or get too personal with the general public,

This is really the end of the discussion right here. But alas, I’ve seen people who are not satisfied with moderation. There are those who are eager to suggest they impose the restriction and sweeping condemnations of technology for the so-called ‘good of society.’

 

[ClearWater]

This is really the end of the discussion right here. But alas, I’ve seen people who are not satisfied with moderation. There are those who are eager to suggest they impose the restriction and sweeping condemnations of technology for the so-called ‘good of society.’

Internet is a spectrum. It has good, bad and in between.

To say Internet never harms is not right, either.

We need to avoid extremes. To think the Internet never harms is also an extreme, because it can, and does.

 

[Joe_5859]

I understand and agree with the main point of critiquing the hand-wringing, but I think the article goes a bit too far in the other direction. I don’t think “ignoring” the naysayers is a prudent course of action. There are legitimate concerns for using technology well. While we don’t need to go overboard in thinking it is all evil and we need to pull the plug on the internet, I don’t think going full speed ahead without care or concern is the right attitude either.

With all the recent breaches of network security (Target, Kmart, etc.), I don’t think being concerned over digitizing health records ought be dismissed as mere “paranoia”. It’s a legitimate concern.

 

[philothea89]

Source

To be frank, it’s about time somebody wrote about this. I keep getting the same phobia vibes on CAF at times. Ironically, the same folks I’ve seen bemoaning Facebook and the internet in general are among those who post here.

I promise I’m not trying to be pedantic–just to add perspective. I agree with you that anti-internet fear-mongering goes overboard, but to say that there’s little to worry about is also an exaggeration. That said, allow me to play devil’s advocate.

With a car, the youngsters could drive anywhere on Sunday. McClenahan didn’t think they’d drive to church. And if they didn’t, he argued, they’d become devilish and depraved.
Kids borrowing cars were more easily able to pick up a sweetheart and drive to some secluded “lover’s lane” or get into other mischief. Before cars this could have happened, but your only options were the girl/guy next door.

Nor did phonographs create a “marked deterioration in American music,” as composer John Philip Sousa feared in 1906.
This made me laugh out loud. I don’t know if phonographs were the cause, but ever since music left the domain of the elite and educated and became something produced by the masses, for the masses, quantity has skyrocketed and quality has gone into the toilet. Go to Bandcamp.com and see how much manure you have to sift through to find something good.

Nor did the telephone “break up home life and the old practice of visiting friends,” as the Knights of Columbus warned in 1926.
This one’s a bit tricky, but I would say that in 1926 not every house had a phone. By the 1950s and 60s the stereotype of a teenager blabbing on the phone for hours already existed. Also, where young people probably used to go out to a hangout spot or walked the streets looking for their friends, they started only meeting each other when an “appointment” had been made.

Nor did writing–a growing activity in the ancient world–“create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories,” as Plato himself hypothesized.
Quick, recite three poems you know by heart. Now, recite something in a foreign language that you’ve memorized. Now, recite 3 word-for-word parables of Jesus. You probably can’t (I can’t!), because memorization has steadily lost importance since literacy rates have improved and the internet has become ubiquitous. Whether this is bad or just neutral, I don’t know, but the statement above isn’t wrong.

**Some 2,400 years later, the Atlantic floated the same thesis about search engines. Its headline: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” **
I had to go without phone service for a week this year (and without internet for two weeks this month). Try it and you’ll realize how much you use it for directions, phone numbers, banking/bill-paying, checking event calendars, the news, etc. We certainly “cache” more of our knowledge in cyberspace than in our own gray matter. Again, whether or not this makes us “stupid,” I can’t say.

Proclamations like these should remind us that every technological revolution will spawn naysayers, who for the most part should be ignored.
Yes, because technology == progress, and progress == good. I’m not Luddite, but I won’t forget the arrogance of the builders of the Tower of Babel.

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

We certainly “cache” more of our knowledge in cyberspace than in our own gray matter. Again, whether or not this makes us “stupid,” I can’t say.

This is really what the article is saying. It doesn’t say anything against moderation. On the contrary, it’s simply pointing out that the human brain in the 21st century is undergoing another pseudo-evolutionary phase of its processing style. I mean I like the idea where I can access/manipulate over a million terabytes of information without a single tool. Alas, it’s not like Plato himself is going to rise up from the grave and tell me this magical, super-brain is actually possible.

The tragedy is that this merely natural trait of the human mind is used somehow as a moral arbiter. There is nothing wrong or right about the way mankind seeks to improve on labor-saving tasks/technologies.

Any belief that goes to ascribe beyond that moral neutrality is what’s wrong.

I’m all for saying technology isn’t perfect. I’m against anything that says it’s of the devil.

 

[on_the_hill]

“The Internet Is Not Harming You. Here’s What’s Harmful: Fearmongering About The Internet”

And I’m supposed to trust this? How do I know that this isn’t some kind of Internet subterfuge intended to convince me to trust the Internet? Eh?

 

[Lost_Wanderer]

“The Internet Is Not Harming You. Here’s What’s Harmful: Fearmongering About The Internet”

And I’m supposed to trust this? How do I know that this isn’t some kind of Internet subterfuge intended to convince me to trust the Internet? Eh?

Me thinks that only serves to further division between those who fear technology and those who embrace it a tad too much.

 

[John_Lazarus]

I promise I’m not trying to be pedantic–just to add perspective. I agree with you that anti-internet fear-mongering goes overboard, but to say that there’s little to worry about is also an exaggeration. That said, allow me to play devil’s advocate.

With a car, the youngsters could drive anywhere on Sunday. McClenahan didn’t think they’d drive to church. And if they didn’t, he argued, they’d become devilish and depraved.
Kids borrowing cars were more easily able to pick up a sweetheart and drive to some secluded “lover’s lane” or get into other mischief.

Especially if Dad owned a Nash.