How ‘Online’ and ‘Offline’ Began to Blur
- Introduction
- Benefits and Convenience
- Potential Negatives
- Reflection
Introduction
In the 21st century, the internet has become an all-encompassing presence. It hasn’t always been this way though. Just over fifty years ago, the basic framework of this world-changing development was still a mere concept. In the 1960’s, the United States Department of Defense began funding projects with the goal of sharing resources between computers. They found success in 1969, when four American universities were able to digitally share resources with each other. The internet as we know it was born.
The men behind the project, namely Donald Davies, Paul Baran, Lawrence Roberts, and Leonard Kleinrock, knew that they may be at the start of something special. However, it is hard to imagine they were aware that their innovation would spark a new era for the human race: the digital age.
As of January 2024, 5.35 billion people actively use the internet. The average person checks their smartphone approximately 80 times a day, and spends 4 hours a day on their mobile device. Citizen’s digital lives are directly intertwined with their human experience. Despite the pervasive nature of digital influence in modern life, the internet is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. It is a new innovation, and the sheer influence it now wields possesses profound potential impacts.
Benefits and Convenience
The internet today would not be nearly as popular if it did not provide a whole host of conveniences and benefits. Circumstances in which the internet can prove to be the easiest solution are varied and growing. Email was one of the first recognizable developments of the digital age, first introduced in 1971. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the internet truly started to gain public popularity, and websites grew in number and detail. While exciting, this digital landscape was still fresh, and was not intimately integrated with people’s daily functions and lives.
Both email and browsing websites are still primary uses of the internet than ever in 2024, but they also only make up a fraction of the public’s digital activity. Today, the internet is used to do things as varied as ordering food, paying bills, streaming content, going to school, finding a new job, interviewing for the position, working at the new job. It has truly become a universe of its own.
The internet has managed to optimize so many processes, and in many cases allowed for greater accessibility to those processes. Need a recipe? Internet. Researching the atmosphere of a distant planet? Internet. Want to rewatch your favorite sports moment? Internet. Dealing with something heavy, and looking to connect with someone who has gone through it before? Internet. Have a lump on your arm? Internet. Your sister across the world is having a birthday party, and wants you to see her open your present? Internet.
These are extremely varied use cases, but the internet provides an unfathomably efficient solution for all of them. In these ways, the internet helps its billions of users in profound and mundane ways every single day. It has probably been of use to you already today, and you are reading these words I have written here on the internet.
Potential Negatives
But as with every good thing, too much of it can often end up being bad. In 2023, the average internet user spent 6 hours and 35 minutes a day on the internet. This accounts for a staggering 41% percent of the average person’s waking hours per day. While everyone has the right to choose how they spend their own time, uncontrolled internet use has been linked to heightened anxiety, loneliness, insomnia, and depression. A 2017 survey of New York university students found that 4 in 5 participants feel they spend too much time online.
One reason people are spending more and more time online is due to the vast monetization of the internet. The more time you spend online, the more money you are likely to generate for companies operating in the digital world. Because of this, online corporations gain tremendously by making a considered effort to keep you online, even if it is at the detriment to your health. In 2021, the e-commerce market was valued at 14.3 trillion dollars. By 2028, that number is expected to be 58.74 trillion.
What about social media? Social media has rapidly formed a cornerstone of the digital experience in recent years, but its negative effects are gradually being spoken about more and more. American students were reported as spending 5–6 hours a day on average on social media, with two-thirds of participants reporting that they were addicted to social media. Social media companies often make money by collecting your data, showing you targeted advertisements based on that data. Recently, popular social media platforms have started pushing more and more products and services on their own platforms as well.
Despite the concerns regarding addiction and wellbeing, social media companies want to keep you on their site for as long as humanly possible, which has led us to the intertwined online and offline social experiences that many humans today experience. The convenience of the internet, and social media more specifically, are unmatched. But without mitigating for potential risks, the internet has seeped into parts of the human experience it may have been better leaving alone.
Reflection
This course has been a great experience for me and my understanding of the digital world I participate in. The content of the course is notably relevant to our lives as the students of today. We are surrounded by innovation verging on science-fiction, and overwhelmed with an amount of content that our brains were not ever evolved to consider. The digital age has provided a new dimension to the human experience, but it can be hard to really step back and ponder the implications when you are so immersed in it yourself. I was born in 2002, and for people my age, it can be hard to separate our collective digital experience from being human at all: that is how prevalent it has become.
By taking this course, I have been able to much more critically consider the impacts of this new era we are living in and how this may impact myself, those around me, and society at large moving forward. I liked how the course started with critical analysis in the digital world. The digital world has prompted unprecedented access to information for the masses, but also has bred unprecedented access to misinformation. Focusing on this right away was important; I think we all consume more information than our brains can properly deduce and being able to critically analyze information is pivotal to having a healthy and positive digital experience.
I wanted to focus on the internet at large because of how far its tentacles reach. We all use the internet more than we think. I originally wanted to extend this further to the IoT, but I found that the internet itself had so many nuances and pockets that I couldn’t expand that reach any further in 1500 words. Regardless, understanding how the internet has grown and how our uses for it and mediums for it have become so unbelievably nuanced and varied is an important fact to take in. I think it is also important to really realize how new the internet is. My parents remember the introduction of the internet. We are the case study, and we must educate ourselves on it. I can thank this course for further insight on how the digital lives we live may be impacting us.
Following these topics, I really enjoyed how philosophical and future-based the content became. The recent rise of AI has presented an equally exciting and harrowing innovation that we as a society will have to manage carefully. Additionally, technology is more and more often impacting how we live our lives offline, whether directly or indirectly. As a psychology student, it is important for me to recognize these factors on how human beings are making their decisions. In the future, I will have to consider how these factors are impacting my decision making as well. I believe the foundations laid out for me in this course will greatly help me navigate our digital society moving forward.
