How has the internet changed everything? This question pops to mind every once in a while, and I wonder if there are weird little longer-term repercussions that aren’t completely obvious. Well, they’re not things that immediately jumped out at me.
Information: What is the value of retention of information? That is, there used to be people who were more or less “human encyclopedias” – people who *knew* things. They were important, because they had the information in their heads. They had pored through the books, and could access it quickly. The value in knowing something was the ability to use that piece of information to draw a conclusion quickly, or see the connecting links between it, and other information. Now, if I get into an argument with someone, and the facts are in question, it’s no longer a question of who’s right – we can find out, relatively easily, in most instances, for most facts, with a quick search. There is instead more of a value on being able to connect facts, to draw complex conclusions from large pools of information, but it’s not the retention of the information that’s important anymore, it’s the understanding that it’s out there, and the ability to retrieve it quickly and accurately.
There’s obviously still value in knowing things – you really have to *understand* something deeply to truly wield the information properly, but I wonder if our school systems, and methods are able to take this shift into account? I suppose I’ve always been irritated at how much rote memorization of stuff we did in school, but it feels like with the essentially instant accessibility of obscure facts and information on the ‘net, I’d much rather be focused on how all those things tie together. A James Burke’s Connections-style of education, rather than the “read this timeline, and spit it back at me,” sort of thing.
Sex: A lot of reactionaries dislike the pervasiveness of porn on the internet. Ok. Let me temporarily put any moral questions about the porn industry aside, though – I’m just talking about essentially free access to a huge variety of people, doing a huge variety of things. I remember, as a teenager, the mystery of women – what did they look like, under all those clothes? The slightest glimpse of anything would send my imagination and hormones into a frenzy. Whee, the joys of teenagerism! But a lot of it was the mystery.
I wonder if, for instance, adultery will decrease, because people have access to remove the mystery – they can say, “Ah, this is what other people are doing. They’re not doing anything substantially different, or better.” Maybe instead, it’s, “Hey, that might be fun.” Point being, without that sort of reference, there’s always the question of, “What’s out there? Is it better than what I have now?” To me, that’s a pretty … er… powerful motivating force – the desire to know whether you have it good – to get another point of reference. So, I wonder if the internet, in some respects, provides that point of reference, and whether that what the longer-term implicatoins of that would be, on the rate of infidelity in the population?
Any others?
I wish the Wikipedia entries had pornographic pictures in them, then it would be Internet nirvana!
In any case, part of the reason I think the Internet is the greatest fucking thing ever is because I have a terrible memory. I can never remember anything I want to remember (although I do retain a lot of crap I wouldn’t mind forgetting). My greatest difficulties in school centered around the memorization of specific facts, dates, etc.
With the Internet, I really don’t _need_ to have a good memory any more. It’s a non issue. I can find information _really_ quickly and use it.
The shift in focus on to useful processing abilities is more where I want things to be.
As for porn, I can’t imagine what it’s like growing up now. When I was a little kid (8 or 9), I stayed over at my grandparent’s house. There was one room where my grandfather kept all the bullets for his guns (he was a cop; the guns were securely locked up) and one night I snuck into it to check them out. In the back of this storage space, was a small stack of old Playboys. I think that was the first time I had seen a naked woman. It was pretty shocking (not too shabby either).
In any case, there was really no means of seeing a naked woman like that, for a little kid, other than through hidden stashes of porn. Now, any kid can fire up a web browser, and find just about anything they could possibly want.
It’s very strange. I don’t know how much the inacessability of anything “sexual” for a kid impacted me or other people. Or, conversely, how it will affect kids today who can see whatever they want.
I’ve had 4th graders talk about blow jobs during recess. The internet, and the rise of the porno industry over the past ten years, is definitely impacting the culture as I don’t think I even heard of a blow job until at least 8th/9th grade. Maybe I was slow (and too into comics and toys), but I remember looking at girls differently around 6th grade, Grabbing a butt during 7th (this girl Mandi’s), and asking a girl out in 8th grade (and kissing for longer than 3 seconds).
Now, I can’t count how many girls that I know for a FACT have given oral sex by the time they were in 9th grade.
I had heard of a blow job in the 7th grade, but only the phrase. I had NO IDEA what it meant at all, and then even after I found out, the phrase still didn’t make any sense. I think my peers were in the same boat.
I remember that when I was out in the hallway after recess in the 4th grade, there were a bunch of girls in my class discussing who had boyfriends and who didn’t. They were all shocked I never had one. This one girl — all the while holding her Cabbage Patch Doll — reassured me that I’d get a boyfriend soon. Even then, I thought that was weird.
In schools, I feel like rote memorization is a band-aid for a broken educational system.
Memorization is important, especially at younger ages, because it teaches mental discipline, but for older folks, rote memorization is not nearly as important as critical thinking.
Unfortunately, critical thinking requires an educational system that fully supports and funds its teachers and we don’t have that now.
So if the internet helps ween us off knowledge as a secret that must be memorized and moves us more towards knowledge as a shared resource that requires mental discipline and training to understand and enjoy, then I think the internet is doing a really good thing.
And I think the internet is having some of that effect. I think the teachers may have to work harder to keep students from simply referring to the internet to take care of their assignments and I think that this is ultimately a good thing.
As for porn, it is a personal belief of mine that forbidden fruit over-inflates the importance of the fruit in question and therefore leads folks to have false expectations of the merits of said fruit.
*cough*
Example:
The way some people talk about sex, you’d think it has the power to blind you where you stand and solve all your problems (including the word problems), as long as you wait to do it with the one you love.
Fact is, it’s great, but it’s not going to revolutionize your life (unless maybe I am not doing it right). I mean, really, honestly, it’s great, but I still have to pay for ESPN even though I don’t watch it.
I do respect that people have their own moral voice they need to follow, but I also believe that some people would have easier lives if they had a more realistic understanding of what these forbidden fruit are really like.
So if the internet helps with that understanding, I think it is a good thing. I think porn itself can sometimes be problematic, but that is another much larger and more obnoxious post.
Anyway, I like the internet because it rocks. Sure, this is circular, but who gives a fuck. I am posting on the internet and therefore I don’t need to make any sense whatsoever. Critical thinking is 4 l0z3rz.
Fact is, it’s great, but it’s not going to revolutionize your life (unless maybe I am not doing it right).
Duuuuude. You are totally doing it wrong!
😉