How The Promise Of The Internet Was A Lie
In the early 1990s our society was introduced to a new technology that would forever change the landscape of humanity: The Internet. The promise was clear to us all. This new technology would connect us globally and the lightening-quick transfer of information at our fingertips would literally make us superhuman intelligent and informed in ways we could never have imagined before.
This made total sense… but that’s not quite how it unfolded.
If you go back far enough into the early days of the Internet, you’ll find two fascinating national news stories. In 1993, CNN did a report on this new thing called the Internet and what was reported gave us a positive vision of this amazing technology. The segment was full of optimism, saying the Internet would allow the high-tech instant transfer of information between every organization and individual on the planet. It suggested that humanity would evolve into the smartest and most aware the world had ever witnessed. According to this CNN report, then Vice President Al Gore supposedly said he could see a day in the future where kids would come home from school and rather than play Nintendo, would opt to access the Encyclopedia Britannica.
In contrast, NBC news had a slightly different take. In 1994, on the Today show, host Katie Couric said she was afraid of signing onto the Internet because “I would get hooked and never spend time with my family.” Couric also said she was already so inundated with information, she wouldn’t want anymore, posing this question: “Don’t you feel like it’s constant bombardment?” Her co-host, Elizabeth Vargas, replied “Wouldn’t it bother you that there are all these people you don’t really know? Everyone is signing on, having these conversations, whining together or griping together…”
Which one of these sounds like the more accurate description of society today?
While no one can deny that the Internet has brought us innovations, access, and power that has changed our world for the better on all conceivable levels, that golden age seems to be moving quickly into the past as the Internet falls victim to its own evolution of social media. This new era is turning a once powerful tool of unlimited potential for intellectual growth into a cesspool. If it isn’t angry fanatic ideologues determined to cancel or attack anyone that disagrees with them based on the most painfully ignorant Internet sources, it’s Tik Tok and Instagram folks eating Tide Pods, breaking their necks falling off milk crates, or flashing their titties for clout and followers.
And if they’re not doing this, they’re watching a shit-ton of porn.
Early on in the world of the Internet, we got exactly what we thought we would get. Most early news reports focused on the potential positives of unlimited information and it was there for all of us to access. Chat rooms and other forums came into existence and we saw a globally connected world blossom. Information was exchanged and connections were made… with very few reports of problems. In fact, reports of personal attacks and fighting were somewhat rare… and no one was lighting their own shirt on fire to get attention or become famous.
So what changed? My contention is this all changed when social media came into existence. Social media allowed millions of people to be connected to each other via feeds that can spread info instantly to all of them. Forums and chat rooms weren’t designed like this. They had a fraction of the world participating and access required folks to go to a specific Internet address and post, then wait for a response, which could take days, in some cases. In contrast, social media consists of millions more participating, instant notification of someone posting or responding to you, and the opportunity to quickly respond back and sharing this to millions more in a matter of minutes.
Essentially, social media allowed us to eliminate the question: “I wonder what they’re doing or what they think?” Now, we don’t need to wonder… we get that information, even when we don’t want it, and we get it all day, every day, nonstop from millions of people, most of which seem to have no real reason to be a part of the conversation in the first place.
I believe this has created a different culture where a once civilized discourse amongst smaller groups of people looking for genuine and authentic communication has turned into a gigantic Internet riot where people have turned against each other, with the results being nothing more than constant foul-mouthed, profane and offensive attacks. Even the groups of people that agree with each other mount attacks against themselves when they see members they deem not dedicated enough to the belief, or don’t publicly post statements that demonstrate that, or, even worse, slightly cross over into even considering something from the other side.
And this doesn’t include the fact that most people don’t go around trying to offend people, but a lot of folks on the Internet are searching for any reason to be offended… and they will find you.
What the Internet promised us back in the early 1990’s was the opportunity to strengthen our intelligence and empower us to rise to magnificent levels of thinking, becoming more knowledgeable than we ever thought possible, but instead, we didn’t do that. We opted to simply outsource our thinking to this supposed “smart technology” and we’re paying a huge price as a society. We have now arrived into this new social media era of unprecedented anger, ignorance and shallowness, where even the most mainstream debates with readily available, and credible, information is ignored and discussions are turned into the Jerry Springer Show. For example, if you decide to not get a Covid-19 vaccine, you are a racist, elitist, sexist, homophobic, “Trumper” that wants to see children and the elderly die while you fire off M-16s driving a tank through the poor marginalized neighborhoods screaming micro-aggressions. If you are someone who got the vaccine, you are a communist freedom-hating, anti-American, terrorist-loving fascist who supports letting everyone into this country unchecked and is okay with injecting magnets and microchips into people so the government can spy on you.
And that doesn’t even include the folks that are sniffing the powder from bags of Sour Patch Kids or the parents exploiting their own children in videos to become famous. We’re not even cracking the tip of this iceberg.
The point is this. We were led to believe that we were expanding the bounds of our capabilities and intelligence with this new technology, when, in reality, that was kind of an illusion. The Internet promised us the ultimate library of a billion resources, and it delivered that… and much, much more. Unfortunately, it’s the “much, much more” that became the norm and led us into a strange quandary. We were promised all the insight and understanding mankind could produce, and the Internet delivered that, but it also happened to include all the parts that seem to trade-in our humanity and capacity for intellect, empathy and kindness. However, if the Internet so quickly unleashed the parts that pushed us to trade those things in, we have to question if the Internet actually ever delivered on that promised knowledge to begin with.
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