Alex Williams
Emerson
English Composition 110 H6
12 November 2017
The Advantages and Disadvantages of Using the Internet to Find Purpose
With everything, moderation is important in determining if something is safe and healthy or not. This is especially true with the Internet and all of its properties. The Internet is so vast that one must be careful with how they use it. There are both great advantages and disadvantages in using the Internet to make meaning out of something and to find a purpose but the pros outweigh the cons most definitely.
An advantage to using the Internet as a tool to make a meaning out of something or to pursue a purpose is that people are able to work faster and more efficiently than when there was not such advanced technology. Instead of having to wait for information to come in within days maybe weeks, people can now be informed within minutes! Instead of wearing out our hands with writing long essays, we can type out our thoughts with less unnecessary exertion. Sam Anderson, author of the New York Magazine titled, “In Defense of Distraction,” says that “information rains down faster and thicker every day, and there are plenty of non-moronic reasons for it to do so” (Anderson 2). For example, Google Scholar allows anyone who can get on the browser to search for peer reviewed, scholarly journals. Before the Internet, many people would have a more difficult time accessing them.
Also, technological advances in general have led physicians to save lives with their new methods of conducting surgeries (like the robotic assistance in Mitral Valve repair surgeries) which have led some procedures to become minimally invasive and lower risk. The study for a cure to cancer has taken strides in the right direction because of faster technology. Anderson is right in saying there are smart ways to use the information given to us.
One of the big problems is that people think the information is coming in too fast, but even if that is the case, we do not have to expose ourselves to everything all at once. The great thing about the Internet is that it is like a bank: Information is put in for anyone to access. If we want to deposit some knowledge, we can, and we can take away other people’s new found discoveries to use for ourselves. While people will have to take some responsibility and show some willpower when it comes to handling the Internet, it is still a way for them to have access to all the information and make sense of it for themselves so they can find new meanings and purposes for it.
Bill Wasik, who is a senior editor at Wired magazine, created something called the “Mob Experiment.” Basically, the idea was to get a whole bunch of people in one place and for them all to do the same thing at the same time. It sounds kind of silly, but it was born out of boredom and revealed something very interesting about society. But first of all, Wasik had to get ahold of all these people. Did he send a smoke signal or was it through pigeon mail? No, it was through email. Email allowed Wasik to contact people that years before he would not have been able to reach. Sending an email only takes a couple seconds after it is all typed up; all one has to do is click a button, and an entire manuscript can be sent from one side of the world to another. Wasik says, “…my email had generated enough steam to power a respectable spectacle” (Wasik 476). Again, just the fact that he was able to contact hundreds of people instantaneously shows that the Internet is a powerful tool that can be used to our advantage.
Also, the “Mob Experiment” gained a lot of media attention. By this time, online newspapers had been in use for a while, so information about the Mob Experiment was spread technologically. The ability to review the Mob Experiment at all (through interviews that are then published online, blogs, etc.) is a product of finding Internet’s purpose. This is why we have the Internet; people spread news faster than ever before.
A disadvantage to using the Internet as such a strong tool is the distraction it causes and the ability for people to manipulate the Web to perform malicious activities. While distraction is inevitable anywhere, it is especially a problem that comes with all of the good the Internet breeds. Sam Anderson spoke to David Meyer who is one of the “experts” on multitasking (a form of distraction). Anderson says about Meyers that “he sees our distraction as a full-blown epidemic- a cognitive plague that has the potential to wipe out an entire generation of focused and productive thoughts” (Anderson 3-4). Meyers is right to be concerned when people have shown that they can not control themselves when it comes to technology. How many times do people out on the road see others driving and texting? It could be as harmless as posting false information. It is still irresponsible to say something is a fact when one has not checked for themselves to make sure it is true. And where does this all happen? It all happens on the Internet. But even though humanity has taken this risk, it is still worth it because of the gains we receive in return. Anderson also mentions that “every interruption costs around twenty-five minutes of productivity” and Wasik says “…white collar office workers can work for only eleven minutes, on average, without being interrupted” which very well may be true, but it seems a bit pointless to measure that when there are probably other more productive things to do (Anderson 5, Wasik 488). Instead of confirming that yes, there is a distraction problem, people should already be working on a solution.
The other disadvantage to making the Internet so powerful and trying to find purpose in it is that if those people can use the Internet, then so can the people that do not care about finding a purpose other than pleasing themselves. The “Darknet” also called the Dark Web is a part of the Internet that was originally created for government use, but it is legally bound to be open to the public so anyone can use it. The Dark Web is accessed through the Tor browser. What all of this means is that this specific browser (Tor) hides the IP address that using a normal browser like Google or Yahoo! tags onto its users. With Tor, ones location is unknown.
The good news is that Tor has allowed people to go on the Internet and know they can not be found and it creates a greater sense of security. More specifically, it has “…empowered activities to spread news during the Arab Spring; it’s helped domestic violence victims hide from online stakers; and it’s allowed ordinary citizens to surf without advertisers tracking them” (Kushner). This makes up the majority of Tor browser users. These users do not use the “darknet” rather they just use the Tor browser to go about their normal searches for recipes, Youtube videos, etc. Darknet users only make up about “three percent of Tor usage. (And criminal activities are just a fraction of that)” (Kushner). So while the browser is used for malicious activities, the majority of people that have the browser in the first place do not take part in that. Not only that, but not very many people have the Tor browser to begin with.
The bad news is that “the same tools that keep government agents and dissidents anon keep criminals virtually anon too” (Kushner). The darknet is used for many (a lot of times illegal) things such as human trafficking, pedophilia (videotaping of the activity), drug sales, etc. The list goes on. An example of a recent attempt of a major attack was Operation Shrouded Horizon. There were hackers on a site called Darkode and they were supposedly responsible for “wire fraud, money laundering and conspiring to commit computer fraud.” One of the members was even accused of undermining companies like Microsoft and Sony. A man named Ross Ulbricht was recently sent to prison for his activities on the darknet. He was the founder of an online black market called the Silk Road. He is also said to be responsible for the “hackers behind the recent Ashley Madison attacks” (Kushner). All of this sounds really bad and it is; no one is saying that we should ignore this and hope it goes away. What people should not do though, is try to get rid of everyone’s accessibility to the Internet because a few bad people are out there. It has not gotten to the point where this has necessarily become an issue but if it is left ignored and untouched, it may. As of right now, not much is being done at the moment besides finding the founders of these sites and the people doing illegal activities and arresting them. The issue is that a lot of times, it is hard to catch these people in action or to track them since many are anonymous. Again, while this is an issue, and an important one at that, it would be more beneficial to look at the bigger picture and see that this is a very small percentage of people being talked about.
Using the Internet as our primary tool still allows us to find unexpected meanings and purposes in search of our original ideas. Wasik says, “What the Internet has done to change culture- to create a new, viral culture- is to archive trillions of our communications, to make them linkable, trackable, searchable, quantifiable, so they can serve as ready grist for yet more conversation” (Wasik 480). We can reuse information; we have the ability to reinterpret old news in order to find a new path. That is the important thing to hold onto in the midst of everything the internet holds. Before the internet, people still thought and analyzed and philosophized. With the internet being such an integral part of our lives, people can still do the same things and even have a way to document their thoughts. The sense of serendipity in life is still there only now in two worlds: reality and online.