The Positives of the Internet

“We are all now connected by the Internet, like neurons in a giant brain.”

— Stephen Hawking

Chat with anyone around the world. Spread information, ideas, art, culture, love, hate, pictures of cats. This quote by Stephen Hawking encapsulates the effects of the Internet: nothing short of a cultural revolution experienced by the entire human race. And I’m not blind to that. A lot of this blog thus far has consisted of bashing the internet and technology as a whole, and today I want to go in a different direction.

I love the internet. I use it every single day of my life, and I have ever since my family got a computer back when I was 9 years old. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I was unwittingly engaging with one of human kind’s largest achievements. Now that I’m older, and I understand a little bit more, the internet just blows my mind.

The World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, and it has since grown exponentially into a massively integrated facet of everyday life for billions of people. In 2008, Google’s search engine had logged over 1 trillion unique pages on the internet, and considering it’s 2016 now, that number is probably much higher.

It’s safe to say people have embraced the internet. And that is because it does so much good in our lives today.

First and foremost, the dissemination of ideas and information across the world has never been easier. I can learn anything about anything, whenever I want. For example, if you didn’t already know, there are around 5,000 islands off the coast of China, and yesterday, Kim Kardashian was in Madison Square Garden in New York! Crazy! While critics of the internet might note how much B.S. and useless crap is all over the internet, anyone who has ever written a college essay knows how beyond useful it is for finding out random, distinct facts about your topic.

Another major plus, especially as a college student, is the ability to communicate face to face over video chat with my family back in Northern California. Yes, college is all about growing up and becoming independent, but being able to see my families faces every now and then is much better than going months at a time with nothing but phone calls.

The internet itself is a society with countless subgroups. A good representation of this can be seen from www.reddit.com, whose slogan is “The front page of the internet”. On this site, you can subscribe to what are called subreddits, or sub-communities of users posting relevant content with a specific focus or goal. For example, if you are into politics, there’s a subreddit for that. Or, if you want to meet people who really like dressing up cats to look like humans, I am 100% confident you will find what you are looking for. Another example of this can be seen from groupings of sports fans. As I’m from the Bay Area, I follow a San Francisco Giants page, a Golden State Warriors page, and more.

So yeah, the internet is pretty cool. It allows me to learn, explore interests, and interact with people I otherwise would’ve never had the chance to talk to (for better or worse).

But, in the end, this blog is dedicated to exploring the unknown effects of the internet on human psychology, on interactions with people, and on how the brain functions and changes with exposure to the internet and technology. This quote by journalist Andrew Brown succinctly describes my point:

“The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.”

So understand its greatness, its influence, and its cache of viral videos and memes. But don’t forget that this thing has only been around for 25 years, and who knows what long term affects await humanity thanks to Tim Berners-Lee creation.