Humanity has come a long way over the course of our short period of existence. We’ve created some truly incredible inventions such as languages, the wheel, electricity, and penicillin, those are just a few of our greatest. Now take a second to imagine our world without some of those examples. It’s a dark world of disease, confusion, and a great number of squares. Not a whole lot has been lost or sacrificed with the creation of the previously mentioned inventions. Now, can we say the same about the Internet? Over the course of this essay, my goal is to exclude my own opinions as much as I can while provoking thoughts that might form new questions and opinions of your own. The Internet has had a colossal impact on our world no doubt. The big question is what have we lost and gained along the way, and are we better off? We could start this discussion in any number of ways, so why not start at the beginning? What is the Internet and what was its original purpose? I could throw out a bunch of tech jargon, but in all honesty I wouldn’t know a good majority of the things I would be saying and you most likely wouldn’t understand it. So let’s save each other the trouble. Simply put, the purpose of the Internet was to communicate a piece of data, or information, from one digital business source to another. What the Internet is, is just a global connection of all those devices which pass data back and forth. Now the whole
Armattoe 2 concept of the Internet was purely for business purposes, obviously that changed. When the discussion for commercializing the Internet began, people had high hopes of how this would connect us all. We are connecting, there’s no questioning that. What I question, though, is if we’re connecting to the best of our abilities in the ways we wanted? There is a surplus of ways in which we are now able to connect and communicate with one another. Websites such as Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter, and Myspace have opened the floodgates for messaging and sharing instantly. Reconnecting with old classmates and distant family has become so simple and accessible that even children as young as five have the capabilities of performing such tasks. The ways in which we even hold intimate relationships has changed. Couples meeting online or through dating applications and games isn’t such an uncommon story to hear now a days. Long distance relationships don’t have to feel so long distance anymore. My mom and dad tell me of their yearlong experience with their whole long distance relationship from time to time. Quite frankly I don’t see how they were able to maintain such a relationship for that long back in the 1980’s. My girlfriend and I find ourselves in the same situation as my parents, but with all the mediums in which we can communicate with each other, our relationship seems much simpler to maintain. I’m amazed by the relationships we form online, because they can be truly remarkable whether they’re intimate or friendly. I also feel I’ve seen some degradation in social skills and abilities because of the Internet. Frequently I visit sports forums and
Armattoe 3 websites to read articles about the rise and fall of teams and players. At the end of such articles you can find a comments section. These comment sections can be found just about anywhere, but the concern I wish to bring up is the way in which we debate and state our opinions in these locations. I do realize our interactions online are not at all the same as the ones we display person to person, but in a way that concerns me. Why shouldn’t we be able to hold healthy debates where we state our opinions and back them up facts? What i’m seeing are back and forth comments/rants that go completely off topic and get offensive very quickly. I can only hope that this is an isolated group of individuals and that those who are able to debate and communicate in a healthy way simply choose to stay out of the discussion and spend their time using the Internet more wisely.