The Old Internet of 1995…A Simpler, More Exciting Time

Every once in a while, I find myself yearning for a not-so-distant past. The past I yearn for is not the 50’s 60’s, 70’s, or 80’s. It’s the 90’s. Specifically, the mid-90’s. Why do I yearn for this year? Well, as I mentioned in an earlier post, 1995 was the year the Internet “opened” for public use. It was also a year in which a fair amount of people had access to the Internet. Not a whole lot of people, but an amount large enough to form something of a community. In 1995, the Internet was a small community populated largely by geeks, since geeks were one of the few groups in America who possessed enough inclination to actually buy and learn how to use a computer.

The Internet back in 1995 had a strange feel to it. At least, I think it did, but I’m looking at all this in hindsight. Anyway, the feel was that of an unexplored wilderness where anything was possible. The Internet was a wondrous, mysterious, and even dangerous place. It possessed the qualities I now associate with the deep web. In contrast, the Internet of today feels like a sterile office space where everything is cordoned off into its respective spaces. There’s no more mystery. Everything seems to be a known, the unknown has been all but vanquished (thankfully the unknown of the deep web is still around). So, it seems that I don’t yearn for the past so much as I yearn for that feeling of mystery, excitement, and unexplored horizons. After all, I don’t yearn for the dial-up speeds or the baseband connection. I’m glad those are gone. Though, I do feel a pang of nostalgia whenever I hear the AOL tone signaling an attempted connection to the Internet. If you’re older than 20 years of age, you know what I’m talking about.

As I mentioned above, I’m looking at this from hindsight. To add another perspective, let’s take a look at the Internet from the point-of-view of a geek from 1995. Did he have the same feeling I get whenever I remember the Internet in 1995? Probably not, or maybe he did experience the same feeling of mystery and excitement. After all, the Internet was “new” back then. Or, perhaps, the geek in 1995 yearned for the ARPANET of 1985 and before. Maybe the geek in 1995 saw his Internet as I see my, 2015, Internet: as a boring, commercial, sterile wasteland. The Internet was commercial back in 1995 and, while not as commercial as today, would have seemed as commercial to the geek in 1995 who only had the ARPANET for comparison. We all seem to long for those glory days that, perhaps, weren’t as great as we believe. 

I guess it’s all in a person’s perspective. Perhaps the Internet will morph into an even larger sterile, commercial environment 10 years from now, and I’ll long for the glory days of 2015. Heh, it’s a funny thought.

Ten years ago, I couldn’t imagine the Internet getting much bigger. Over those ten years, I’ve witnessed it grow. And right now, I can’t imagine the Internet getting much bigger. Perhaps I ought to learn from my past misconceptions about the Internet. The Internet is a constantly shifting, moving, expanding, growing life-form. It’s difficult to say in advance what will become of this life-form. I think the one sure thing about the Internet is growth. It will grow and grow and grow with no clear end in sight, barring a nuclear war.

With all this in mind, let’s keep an open mind about our current Internet and its future. There’s still much that can happen. Not everything that will be invented has been invented. It’s up to us, the citizens of the present transitioning into the future, to create and innovate. There’s still plenty of mystery and excitement to be had. We just need to look past all that commercial crap and, while that’s kind of hard to do these days, it’s a worthwhile endeavor.

So, go forth and run on wires of glass and electric fire!

Supercomputers: The Deity just Waiting to Happen

The increasingly prevalent electronic technology in first-world and developing nations brings with it far-reaching, enormous, and even unseen consequences. An enormous and yet to be fully recognized consequence of all this technology is integration. You know that old expression, “Everything is connected”, well, it seems that people have taken that expression a bit too literally. Everything is connected and not just in the sense that everything influences everything else. Computers, smartphones, tablets, iPads, reading tablets, remote servers, nodes, networks, etc. are all connected in at most eight different ways. No phone is an island and all roads lead to phone. Since we have all this connectivity going on, along with the blessed always-on WIFI connectivity, is it too much to speculate that a supercomputer could come along and take command of all these devices? Perhaps the Supercomputer is already here and looks down, benevolently, upon us lowly net-runners. Let’s hope, indeed, that this new God is benevolent, lest our information be given to those who should do us harm.

Okay, that’s enough waxing poetic. Time for some analysis. Supercomputers are already here and they are “super” only when compared to contemporary processors. Supercomputer is, thus, a relative term as a computer is only “super” within its own context. A Commodore 64 isn’t “super” when compared to a Dell Inspiron Desktop computer with a 4th Generation Intel Core i7 Processor. But the Commodore 64 was a supercomputer when compared to its forerunner, the Commodore VIC-20.

What I mean by “supercomputer” is a computer that has clearly outclassed its contemporaries in processing power AND has sovereignty over an entire network of connected devices. When I say “network”, imagine a network as large as the Internet. Think of it as a God-machine. And if this God-machine isn’t already here, it’s coming to a future near you.

The supercomputer pictured above is the Blue Gene/P supercomputer at Argonne National Lab. Within its architecture, it possesses 250,000 processors all connected by high-speed optical network. Does this supercomputer fit my definition of a God-machine? To a degree, it does. The Blue Gene/P is designed to have a processing power that can reach into petaFLOPS. FLOPS is an acronym for Floating-point Operations Per Second. And petaFLOPS is at least 10^15 Floating-point operations per second. Therefore, Blue Gene/P can process over 10^15 floating-point operations per second. It’s also one of the most power-efficient supercomputers in existence.

So, the processing power does meet the requirement of being a God-machine (and there are supercomputers out there that have an even greater processing power), but is the Blue Gene/P sovereign over an Internet-like network of computers? No. At least no one has yet confirmed whether it does have sovereignty over any such network.

Voluntary sovereignty (“voluntary” meaning the clients on the network consent to being subordinated to the supercomputer) is a serious ethics consideration. An even greater ethics consideration is involuntary sovereignty over a network as large as the Internet. That’s scandal material right there. My guess, and this is just a guess, is that there are computers out there that do possess involuntary sovereignty over millions of clients connected to the Internet.

Now, if my guess is correct and these computers do have the processing power of supercomputers, it would mean the God-machines are already here. The only question remaining is just how far and how deep the hands of the God-machine reach? That’s something to which I can’t even venture a guess, so I’ll leave it up to you.

For our sake, I hope the God’s are benevolent.

Electronic Ghosts from the Past

Recently, I reset my voicemail password so I could access a function on my phone I hadn’t been able to access for many years, my voicemail. By “many years”, I mean seven years. A millennium in Internet years. When I accessed my voicemail, I was greeted by an electronic voice that proceeded to read out a timestamp on the earliest voicemail. It read “Your message from (---) --- ---- sent Wednesday, September 21, 2008 at 4:31 pm”, then proceeded to play the recorded voicemail. I had voicemail messages from old friends (who were kids at the time), school counselors, people who I have since forgotten, unknown people, and more. Some of the more fascinating, and creepier, messages consisted of unintelligible voices in the background, cloaked in electronic noise. Fortunately enough for my own sanity, the messages ended around the year 2010. I don’t know what happened to the messages that occurred after 2010. Maybe people decided to stop leaving me voicemail since I never got back to them. Anyway, I had around 20 recorded messages stored in my voicemail box. All have been deleted (or were they?). Are they truly gone?

This was an eerie experience to say the least. It was like listening to ghosts from my past, all perfectly recorded, stored, preserved, and transmitted via electronic signal. This incident reminded me of a common phenomenon in the tech world. It’s fairly common for old answering machines and phone lines to operate years after the associated business or organization has gone defunct. If you’re lucky, or not so lucky, you can hear a playback message when you call a number of a no-longer existing organization. The playback message is always creepy, no matter the content. There is a strong association with death, with the message, since the message was once used by a “living” organization. Since the organization is defunct, it’s like hearing a voice from a corpse. Perhaps now you understand why I found my old voicemail messages disturbing, if you didn’t before. Perhaps, too, this blog will go inactive one day and I can visit it again, many years from now, to peek at the works and writings of my past self. Technology will have preserved it all in fine detail. I can only hope that I won’t be too critical of my past writings.

Truly, the majority of people on planet earth have left at least some kind of digital footprint on the Internet. Most people don’t care about these footprints (likely because they don’t think about them). Other people, for various reasons, hope to wash away any footprints they have left. This is next to impossible. Your digital footprints have left behind digital dirt that will remain even after the most intense of scrubbings. It’s almost as if the Law of Conservation applies to data: though data may change its form, it will never cease to exist. My voicemail messages may still exist, in some form or other. Perhaps they are in the “recycle bin” of Verizon’s servers. Perhaps someone else may have kept copies of my voicemail messages. That wouldn’t be surprising, though I can only pity the person who has to sift through my voicemail messages. I don’t even like listening to them.

Is there any information archive more reliable than the Internet and the servers which are its foundation? Even when the power is out, the data lives on in long-term persistent storage. So be mindful of what you put, or where you visit, on the web. Anyone may have enemies and its best to not give your enemies any kind of advantage over you, be mindful for this reason. And be especially mindful for this reason : What you produce will be your legacy, for better or for worse, so be sure you leave a lasting and good legacy.

The Technocratic Elite and The Future They Hold in their Hands

Imagine you are living in a city that receives all of its hot water from one boiler room, run by one man who possesses exclusive knowledge on how to run the boilers. Now, you can imagine that this man has quite a bit of power. The city needs hot water and the boiler man is the only person who can supply the water, thanks to the knowledge that only he possess. This man is known as a technocrat. His technical abilities have lifted him above, and separated him from, his fellow man. He is a member of the elite and all people, if they are to receive the benefits only he can provide, must work to please him. And that is the future we are walking into.

Technical ability is one of those skills that has been widely prized throughout history. Those people who possessed technical ability in useful disciplines often were handsomely rewarded for their services. Blacksmiths in the middle ages commanded a high price for their services thanks to the usefulness of their craft. Merchants and artisans during the Renaissance were invaluable thanks to their business savvy minds. Today, plumbers, electricians, and tradesman are valued members of society thanks to their own technical abilities. While various technical abilities are still prized today, there are few technical abilities more valued today than technical ability in computing and mechanical engineering. But, to keep fully with the spirit of this blog, I just want to focus on technical ability in computing.

The use and ubiquity of computers has grown exponentially since the introduction of the first operating system over 60 years ago. Just 25 years ago, computers occupied most business places, offices, government buildings, organizations, and homes. Now, in 2015, computers have a hold so tight on first-world civilizations that we can’t imagine our lives without them. Just about every piece of electronic equipment we have has some sort of computing device built-in. They are in our cars, televisions, phones, tablets, microwaves, dishwashers, stoves, ovens, washing machines, cash registers, home-heating systems, entertainment systems, game consoles, etc.  You can find computers where you least expect them. I smoked an e-cigarette for a short while only to learn later that it too had a small built-in processor, which, quite frankly, blew my mind. It was at that time that I fully appreciated how far and how deep computers have spread and dove.

What does all this mean? It means technical ability reigns supreme in the hands of the technocrats.

But what is a technocracy? In the opening paragraph of this post, I called the boiler man a technocrat because he had possession of useful and exclusive knowledge. However, he’s only a technocrat in an unofficial, but important, meaning of the term. The traditional definition of a technocracy is as follows: A technocracy is a system of  government that is controlled by a group of elite technical experts. The idea of a technocracy first emerged in the early 1900’s. The original idea was to have scientists and engineers replace business people and politicians in governing society. Sounds good, right? Well, I’m not hear to argue about the merits of a technocracy. Instead, I want to focus on the technocrats themselves and the hold they have over most people in our high-tech civilization.

In the United States, we don’t have a technocracy by law. We have a Constitutional Republic with representatives that are elected by their voters. A technocracy doesn’t work that way. Instead, the lead technicians assume social and governmental control over the populace by virtue of their ability. Technocrats are intended to be benevolent dictators who know what’s best for the common man and are to act in the common man’s best interests.

To reiterate, a technocracy is a system of government controlled by elite technical experts. The United States doesn’t have a technocracy, or does it? As mentioned above, the United States isn’t a technocracy by law. Instead, I’ll argue that it is a technocracy by fact.

Think about it. We are absolutely dependent on our technological devices. Most people would be severely lost without their personal gadgets and gizmos. Our technology has, on one had, greatly improved people’s standard of living. On the other hand, it has made most people incapable of living without it. You could almost say that most people are “ruled” by technology. And who rules the technology? Who designs it, implements it, and understands it? The technocrats (and boiler man) of course. Thanks to our sophisticated technology, we live in a de facto technocracy! The technology that we depend upon has elevated the technocratic class to a god-like status.

What a disappointment if you aren’t a technocrat! If you are a technocrat, it’s a pretty good deal to say the least.

Is this a sorry state of affairs? Not necessarily provided our technocratic overlords are a kind and benevolent bunch. But if you aren’t comfortable with this state of affairs and can’t stand the thought of being at the “mercy” of the technocrats, you can always improve your own technical abilities. That is the route I have chosen and I don’t see myself regretting it. Technology is here to stay. What matters now is whether you choose to understand it or leave that responsibility to the technocrats.

Website Aesthetics

Does anyone else dislike the so-called “modern” aesthetics of some websites? To see what I mean, just look at squarespace. These websites are going for the sleek, simple, “no borders” look. And while the goal of the modern layout is to offer a sleek and smooth experience, it only seems to offer a confusing mish-mash of web content.

I’m just glad most sites have stuck with the a more traditional web-style. Don’t get me wrong, I do like some modern web aesthetics. Just look at my blog. It’s a combination of old and new web-styles (To see an example of the old, just look at cyber.eserver.org). When editing the HTML/CSS of my blog, I do my best to take the best aspects of both the old and new styles, and integrate the two in order to make my blog both functional and stylish. Websites that use the “modern” style exclusively seem to be going for style at the expense of function. And it’s questionable whether they’ve even achieved style.

Anyway, this will be a short post. I just wanted to give my two cents on the matter.

Postscript: Here’s another site which I think successfully melds old and new web-styles.

Programming a Ghost

The worth of anything can be measured by its tendency to inspire thought. In other words, if it can make me think, then it has to be good! Fair enough, right? Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex is one of the few anime that has provoked a good deal of thought in me. In fact, no other anime has inspired me to think about such worthwhile topics like consciousness, perception, metaphysics, artificial intelligence, programming etc. Lately, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex has brought yet another idea to my mind: the idea of the ghost. For those unfamiliar with the series, a person’s personality, thoughts, behaviors, attitudes, ideas, etc. is referred to as the person’s ghost. In a nutshell, a person’s ghost is their conscious (I’ll use the words “ghost” and “conscious” interchangeably in this post). The ghost is one of the most referenced themes in the series. The plot continuously relates to the ghost and a lot of speculation is made by the characters about the ghost. It’s even speculated that a ghost can be created, or emerge, from self-modifying and self-improving artificial intelligence.

So, can a ghost be programmed or emerge from an existing program? Before we can determine this, we must know how we determine the existence of a ghost in a person. Well, it’s pretty obvious that people have a conscious right? We see a person, we hear them talk, we listen to them as they express themselves, we observe them as their ideas, opinions, and attitudes change. It’s pretty clear that people are conscious. People are even conscious of themselves. They are self-aware. Can a program become self-aware?

Now that we know how to determine whether someone has a ghost, can we tell whether a machine has a ghost? Enter the Turing test. A Turing test measures a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent human behavior equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. To pass a Turing test, a machine must convince a person that it is human at least 30% of the time in a series of five minute rounds. Has a machine ever passed a Turing test by exhibiting intelligent human behavior? Most machines are quite primitive in their ability to act in an intelligent manner (compared to an intelligent human). Then again, most people don’t act in a reasonably intelligent manner (compared to an intelligent human). Therefore, most machines will perform in ways indistinguishable from that of most humans. Defining intelligent human behavior is another ordeal altogether, but I trust the people who implement Turing Test’s to know what they are doing. Okay, now that we’ve got that resolved. The answer to the aforementioned question is “Yes”, a machine has passed a Turing test.

So, a machine can appear to be a person by appearing to have a ghost, a conscious. It should be noted that appearing to have a ghost and actually having a ghost are too completely different things. However, the fact that a machine can appear to have a ghost makes it indistinguishable from actually having a ghost. Let us note that the machine appeared to have a ghost during a Turing test. Turing tests are made up of many, five minute rounds. I’m sure the machine would be less likely to appear to have a ghost if the rounds were longer or if the questions became more complex or if the environment were altogether different. Additionally, appearance is subjective. The machine could appear to be human to one person and non-human to another person. Additionally still, it is important to how we define what a reasonably intelligent person would do in a certain situation. Context matters.

All in all, even considering my reservations about the Turing test, the fact that a machine has passed the Turing test is a great feat in programming and, perhaps, we are well on our way to seeing the emergence of a ghost within a machine. But, for a moment, let us consider how difficult it would be to program a human consciousness.

A comparison may be made between basic brain activity and basic computer functions. The brain is made up of roughly 40 billions interneurons. Neurons are a lot like on/off switches. They require just the right amount and kind of chemical signal before they “fire” their electric charge down the axon to the axon terminal. And that’s all basic brain activity is, just an enormous series of neurons getting triggered and releasing their chemicals which, when performed en masse, form human thought. Basic computer functions work much the same way. The most basic machine language is known as binary. Binary is just a long sequence of 1’s and 0’s. The 1’s represent “on” and the 0’s represent “off”. They either “fire” or they don’t “fire”. See where I’m going with this? The most basic machine language seems to mimic the most basic brain function. Since this basic brain function, performed in aggregate, form the human conscious, does that mean a sophisticated enough binary could form a conscious equivalent to a human’s?

Let’s say that my comparison above holds weight, what would it take to program a conscious? Well, the code would likely need to be similar to that of the human brain. It would need to be sequential, self-modifying, and a little illogical. Would simply programming a personality using 40 billion lines of code work? Will the code become self-aware? That’s hard, if not impossible, to tell. Could the code be programmed to continually expand itself by incorporating new data into its structure? Self-modifying code is already possible, but could a code continually self-modify to same extent as a human brain? Would all this self-modification lead to the emergence of a ghost? Possibly, but, sadly, we may never know.

Due to the limits of human perception, we may never be able to tell whether a machine truly possesses a conscious or whether a machine is self-aware. Yes, we can use Turing Tests ad infinitum and the machine may always convince the human that it is a human, instead of a machine, but, as mentioned earlier, this doesn’t mean that the machine has a conscious. It just means that the machine is sophisticated enough to trick a human, and that’s it.

Though we may never know for certain whether a machine has a ghost, we may still highly suspect it. Electronic computers have come a long way since their appearance on the scene in 1942. And some computers are now sophisticated enough to convince a human that they do have a ghost, even though they may not have one. Yes, I just admitted that I think the machine that passed the Turing Test may have a conscious. Indeed, who’s to say the machine’s we currently rely upon don’t already have ghosts? After all, we as humans can’t really know whether a machine is truly conscious of itself. But, nevertheless, it’s quite fun to speculate on. I predict that, as the years go on, machines will convince us that they are conscious of themselves. What then? The political, social, and economic repercussions would be enormous. But I won’t talk about that now. For now, let’s just humble ourselves with the fact that we may never know whether a machine is conscious. If its any comfort, you can look forward to the possibility that, if machines do develop consciousness, it will happen in the near future. The future is always closer than you think.

All in all, just something to think about.

 

Is The Internet Bad for Us?

Recently, I was on a forum and one of the posters made a comment asking why the 90’s were so great and everything since then has been in decline. Other posters chimed in with their own thoughts on the causes of the alleged societal downturn. Many of the posters cited the the popularization of the Internet as being the main culprit of our “deteriorating” society. But I’m not here to argue whether today’s society is worse than yesterday’s society. This post is intended to explore a rather complicated question: Is the Internet bad for us and has it weakened society overall?

First, a little background. The Internet’s precursor, ARPANET, was decommissioned in 1990. The Internet became a commercial entity in 1995 and, thus, became open to the public in the mid 90’s. Though the Internet “opened” in 1995, back then, it was still a realm mostly populated by tech geeks and people who had a “way” with computers. So, when did the Internet actually become popular?

According to this chart pulled from Wikipedia, 16% of the world’s 6.5 billion populated was using the Internet in 2005. That’s 1.04 billion people. I think its safe to say that the Internet was in popular use before 2005. Well, it seems clear that the popularization of the Internet coincided with the “worsening” of society, as claimed by random people on the Internet. But, the question remains. Did the Internet help or harm society? This is a complex question and there isn’t an overall “yes” or “no” answer. In fact, I believe the Internet has both helped and harmed society. As to whether the Internet has done more harm than good, as I mentioned, is a complex issue that will depend largely on the value judgments of the observer. Additionally, the Internet is still a young tool and we have not yet seen the full effects of its implementation and use, and we may never will. To keep things simple, I’ll just list my observations about the positive and negative effects of the Internet, up to this point in time. First the positives.

Positives

Boon to Commerce and Business

The Internet has had, as few other technologies has had, an incredible and far-reaching effect on the markets of the world. Entire businesses were either crushed or elevated by the advent of the Internet. The Internet even spawned entire industries, namely with the entertainment sector, while severely damaging other industries, like the music industry. Social networking, a near non-existent industry before the Internet, is one of the largest industries currently in existence. Thanks to the Internet, people can be all the more inspired to go commercial, market their products, advertise their services, fulfill customer needs, keep financial records, sell there products, make arrangements, plan, design, communicate, meet, etc. Yes, most of this was possible before the Internet, but the Internet made it all so much easier. But, you may say, not all of this is good. What about those companies that flood the Internet with their obnoxious advertising? How can that be a positive? Don’t worry, I’ll get back to this.

Spread of Ideas and Information

When I meet with new people, to break the ice, I often claim that I have a portal to infinite knowledge and wisdom located in my house. After they stare at me for a bit, they attempt to guess just what the portal might be. Is it my personal library? Nope. Is it my television? Nope. Okay, they say, what is it? It’s my computer. At this, they usually laugh and tend to agree with me. But is my claim wrong? Does the Internet have infinite knowledge and wisdom? No, but does seem like it, at times. The Internet is huge and it’s used by just about everyone to spread information and ideas. Most people tend to cloister themselves off and only focus on a few sources of information, but the option is always there for them if they want to venture out and encounter new information and ideas that may or may not contradict their own information and ideas. There’s plenty of opportunity for mass learning and enlightenment.

Just consider the number of articles, posts, blogs, news outlets, forums, websites, etc. there are on the Internet. And just about anyone can go onto a website or forum and express their ideas to the world. Of course, a lot of the information on the Internet is false. That’s all in the nature of the beast. Still, there’s a lot of true information, often mixed in with the false. You just got to know how to separate the diamonds from the dirt. After awhile, you gain a sense of what makes sense and what doesn’t. You get your very own bullshit detector!

Personal Convenience

Do you shop, pay your bills, check your banking information, or research topics of interest online? Once upon a time, if you wanted to know more about something you would need to visit your local library, talk to friends, or silently contemplate the subject. With the Internet, you no longer need to dust off an old book in order to get the knowledge you desire (with the added bonus that the knowledge will likely be up-to-date). With the Internet, you no longer need to venture out into unknown territory in order to get what you want, just use Amazon.com! The Internet has saved people a lot of time, which should make up for how much time people waste on the Internet.

 Negatives

Remember when I said that the Internet offers the opportunity for enlightenment? Well, this is absolutely true. In fact, this was a very common belief when the Internet first went public. Most people believed the Internet would bring about a golden age of learning and self-improvement. And most people were absolutely disappointed. The mass learning, improvement, and enlightenment just didn’t happen or, rather, it didn’t happen at nearly the expected scale. Many folks then began, and still do, to lament the consequences of the Internet, the failure to achieve mass enlightenment and the baggage the Internet brought along with it. It’s time to talk about the negatives of the Internet.

Apathetic and Desensitized

How many webpages do you think you visit per day? How much information do you think you are exposed to? I reckon a lot. And I mean A LOT. The human brain simply can’t take all that information and make it meaningful, so we have to filter a lot of it out. Even though we have some great information filters in effect, our brains are still bombarded by a great amount of stimuli. This isn’t exactly healthy and its natural (and healthy) for your brain to just shutdown after too much exposure. Fortunately, apathy and desensitivity may be greatly reduced by simply taking a break from the Internet or by limiting how many times you “jump” from webpage to webpage. Speaking of “jumping” from webpage to webpage, that brings us to our next negative.

The 5-Second Attention Span

Here’s a common complaint you hear from old folks and me: “You kids today can’t pay attention for longer than 5 seconds!” Well, it may be a bit of an exaggeration, but its no secret that most of the youth today have the attention span of a grape. Don’t worry, old folks’ attentions spans are nothing to be proud of either. The Internet is doing your attention span any favors. And, to be fair, the Internet isn’t directly killing your attention span. What really kills your attention span is not exercising it! When you “jump” from webpage to webpage, you don’t get the change to focus your attention and, thus, your ability to concentrate weakens from disuse. To be fair, again, the Internet can help you increase your attention span by offering you the chance to read really long posts, like this one.

The Scourge of Social Media

Now, before I begin, let me just say that I can appreciate the benefits of sociability and social media. However, when social media becomes the all-consuming, mindless beast that it is today, that’s when I draw the line. A few paragraphs above, I suggested that I thought the rise of social networking was a good thing. I do think it’s a good thing, but like any good thing, it can quickly become a bad thing when it turns into a lumbering beast filled with mindless celebrity musings. That may sound very elitist, but just look at the stuff celebrities post and tell me, with a straight-face, that it isn’t bullshit. And mindless bullshit at that. We have to draw the line somewhere.

Final Analysis

The Internet is an enormous, wonderful, varied place. In terms of positives and negatives, it’s a completely mixed bag full of both positives and negatives with no general positive or negative tone. We can list the endlessly good and bad things about the Internet, but these lists ultimately depend upon our own value judgments which may or may not have a sound logical basis. Social media may be good for one person and bad for another person. Additionally, remember when I mentioned those obnoxious advertisements? You may not value them, but, astonishingly enough, there are people who do value them. It all depends on what we value. Though, it may be generally agreed that some things about the Internet are universally good or bad, there still will be some people who would disagree with this. And so the debate will continue.

And most importantly of all…

It should be noted that asking whether the Internet is bad for us is like asking whether a hammer is bad for us. Whether it is bad for us depends entirely on how it is used. The Internet should come with a warning label reading “The Internet, if improperly used, could lead to anxiety, insomnia, health complications, procrastination, identity theft, and financial ruin. Enjoy your stay.” The Internet is a tool and, like all tools, has been used to amplify humanity’s best and worst characteristics.

But, if you want my final opinion on whether the Internet is generally good or bad, I’ll say the Internet is generally good, based upon my values and experience up to this time.

If there is one certainty about this “Internet: good or bad?” debate, it’s that the debate will go on indefinitely with no clear end in sight. The debate is as varied and as endless as its subject, The Internet. And I’ll drink to both the debate and the Internet.