Let's start with life in the before-Internet phase. I'll admit it; I'm an 80s nerd. I spend my time watching John Hughes's movies. I wear off-the-shoulder shirts to go to sleep. I know the "Thriller" dance. I have strange urges to go dance near train tracks and drive VW Beetles. But when my mom talks about the 80s, she doesn't talk about the great novels she read. She talks about the music, about the culture, about the hair.
Going further back, my grandparents weren't exactly voracious readers either, even before they got televisions in their houses. (I've never actually heard of televisions in my grandparents' childhood stories.) No one was facilitating great intellectual discourse in Antlers, Oklahoma.
I will admit, quite without shame, that I didn't use the internet for its intellectual value when I was younger. I blogged, sure, but I blogged because I wanted someone to listen, because I felt invisible, and because I was pissed off at my parents. I wrote poetry and posted it because I wanted recognition.
However, that's not what I did forever. Eventually I grew up and started using story sites to get feedback to help me revise my work. I was growing up in a rural Arkansan town. We didn't have creative writing classes. This was the closest I could get. I started blogging to hear others' opinions, instead of just shouting my own. I was going beyond myself and making it into a social thing.
Of course, this was all pre-Myspace and Facebook and Twitter and YouTube. Now everything's social. I'm not sure if that's a good thing or not. But sharing ideas and banding people together under one cause is so incredibly uplifting. Only on YouTube could a group of (mostly) teenage nerds get together and raise $100,000 for charity in the span of a weekend. That's what these kids chose to do in their spare time around Christmas this past year.
I don't know about you, but when I was reading all those books when I was younger, because I was and always will be a frequent reader, I wasn't helping anyone else. I wasn't even discussing what I was reading with anyone. These kids have created a community to help change the world. And it all started with a couple of geeky brothers making videos online.
Like Jesse Brown said in his video, maybe the Internet is doing all the things that people are fearing. Maybe the Internet is the reason that my mom has given me the nickname of absent minded professor. And maybe the Internet is the reason that I am so passionate about Young Adult literature (which is always a quick read). Maybe it's why I am horrible at big scantron tests; maybe it's all a lack of memory. And maybe I spend an hour a week watching YouTube videos of my favorite people instead of reading; maybe that's bad for the future of our literature.
But there's no going back. The Internet isn't going anywhere. And unless we pull The Village and hunker down somewhere, its effect is going to remain with us and with the generations after us. So, I say we stop trying to analyze its bad effects. They're just going to be there. Let's find out how to use it to make the world a better place.
I don't mean to be Miss Sunshine here, but the Internet has made a lot of things easier for our daily lives. Think about the amount of time that it saves us in research. Or think about the communication it's increased. I get to talk to my little brother while he's deployed in Afghanistan for six months because of the Internet. So, yeah, it has its low points (just type the word "woman" into Googleimages with the safesearch turned off and your eyes will bleed), but it also has many advantages. Let's use them!
I agree with your terminology "There's no going back." People who oppose the internet and its uses are fighting something that they might wish was never invented. It feels counterproductive to oppose the internet and its uses.
ReplyDeleteWe should be concentrating on how to make using the internet beneficial for our daily lives. But then again, people fear change and fear things they don't understand.