Part One
I don’t remember a time without the internet. I was born in 1999 and we’ve at least had the internet since 2002. We’ve been playing videogames both online and off my whole life. When I go without video games, I’m fine. I guess it is my phone that causes some form of anxiety when I don’t have it with me- I use it for important things and unimportant things alike. My mother said my behavior was affected once I started using smartphones but my father disagrees. So I guess since I’ve always been linked to technology I don’t feel particularly good or bad without it. When I am in an uncomfortable situation without my phone I do worry, it is convenient to have in case of an emergency, but I wouldn’t consider it an extension of myself. I’m okay if I put it down for class. I’d like to note my mother also mentioned that I’ve never been a nature person- even when I was a baby and could not understand technology. I would scream bloody murder if so little as a black fly touched me- so it’s safe to say that I’ve never been in tune with nature my entire life.
I feel like with my phone and technology though I can work efficiently. I like to multitask and sometimes having two screens to do my work with is easier than one. Video games helped me learn how to read and work as a team. My parents would often allow me to play their online video game even when I was a young age, but in order to do so, I would have to learn how to read what the other players were saying so that they could tell me what to do. My parents played this game a lot and of course, I also played a lot of educational games. I could install software from a CD when I was 4. Maybe social media could negatively affect people, and it did a little when I was younger, but I’ve sort of grown out of letting social media bother me.
Part Two
The first quote that stood out to me was titled “I have Outsourced My Memory” by Charles Seife.
“In retrospect, it was happening to me long before the advent of the Internet. The earliest symptoms still mar the books in my library. Every dog-eared page represents a hole in my my memory. Instead of trying to memorize a passage in the book or remember an important statistic, I took an easier path, storing the location of the desirable memory instead of the memory itself. Every dog-ear is a meta-memory, a pointer to an idea that I wanted to retain but was too lazy to memorize.”
I think that this is an essential point to make in terms of the technology debate raised by the Ted Talk we viewed in class.
I don’t believe I stand with the argument we discussed in class presented by the Ted Talk. As I described in part I, I do not remember a time in my life without modern technology as we know it today. My parents have had the internet since 2002, and although I do remember the internet evolving into what it is today, the transition was relatively smooth and progressed into maturity as I did myself. The quote by Charles Seife resonated with me because although he is describing some loss of memory due to the use of the Internet- he also does admit that this process began long before the Internet even began.
Books are a technology created by people to be a resource for having accessible information; a Library is a collection of said information all in one place. Charles goes on to explain that with the Internet and his computer, he may not remember every factoid he now learns- but he remembers the particular ways in which this data is arranged so that he can find the information he needs efficiently and quickly. The Internet is functionally the same as a library- or in other terms, the next evolutionary step of a library. This is not too dissimilar from the fact that my generation could be considered the next evolutionary step of humankind.
This is where I come to my first conclusion in opposition to the Ted Talk speaker. One major claim he made is that technology is evolving at a faster rate than humans are. Based on my own experiences in my life, I don’t consider this point to be true. The internet was made publicly available in 1991. I’ve had the internet available to me my entire life, and as I had mentioned previously, grew myself as the internet did beside me. It may be true that I and my generation are still behind in the more complex realms of technology, but we took to the new technologies that developed in the past two decades easier than those older than us because we matured alongside the new advances. I may not be an expert, but based off my experience and this quote, which mentions that these changes were happening anyway, that humankind’s ability to understand and adapt to technology also grows at an exponential rate – rather than linearly. However, it could be possible that rate is slightly lower than the growth of technology, and the change happens generationally more than yearly.
The other quote I would like to reference comes from “Will the Great Leveler Destroy Diversity of Thought?” By Frank Tipler.
“The Internet is currently the great leveler: it allows everyone to have access to exactly the same information. Will this ultimately destroy diversity of thought?”
Overall, I disagree with this quote for several reasons. In rural Maine, there aren’t many diverse thinkers (or diversity in general)- and it is much harder for students without the Internet than those who have it. I believe my sister and I were able to stand out in our community because of the interests, passions, and exposure to the world that we received through the internet. Everyone can access the same information on the internet, but there is so much information and your journey with the Internet can be so different compared to others. The internet challenged my closed world views and helped shape me in ways that I couldn’t have been without it.
Also, if you read into this passage more, Tipler is discussing his inconveniences with the quick advances the internet cause. He expresses that at the moment his University is unable to access a full library of scientific articles on the internet because it is too expensive. I want to be very clear that this is not the fault of the Internet itself. This is caused by those in the scientific community who do not wish to publicly report their findings for free. The Internet itself did not make it so articles on SCI cost money.
Which leads me to another point that I want to make that counters the Ted Talk. In the Ted Talk, the speaker seemed to imply a lot that the way web applications and the Internet, in general, are designed is why we have so much toxic content or money scandals. I want to argue that this is not the case. Humankind has always been subject to greed, hatred, and fear. Based on my earlier point, that humankind evolves alongside technology, this greed, hatred, and fear have only also evolved to match as much. The Internet and Social Media evolve from the people who use it. Since the culture of a particular website is defined by its population or “residents”, moral codes and ethics can differ from site to site. This is just like how a small, white majority town in Maine has different moral codes and ethics than a larger, diverse city. Prices to access certain parts of the Internet was not made by the Internet, rather the private people or companies that chose to collect money for exclusive content.
But connecting back to Charles Seife, one may consider that this is just an evolutionary step from books. Books are a technology that costs money to buy- and the moral and ethical statements hidden between the bindings were created by a person. At the end of the day, the Internet is not far different.
In sum, the point I am trying to make is that the Internet is merely a tool. It is a playground that was released for the public to use- and the public decided to use it. We cannot consider the Internet the evil for making the world as it is today. The world has always been full of evil, regardless of the scale of our technology. We must look deeper and find that it is the collective mind of the world populace that is forever in chaos, and it is a chaos that technology designers may never be able to control.
(Also, 2001: A Space Odessey wasn’t a very convincing film.)
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