Question Is Internet ruining our minds?

[Andy44]

Every time something new comes out and completely revolutionizes our culture, a bunch of conservative ignorant old people have to complain about how it's destroying society. Cars, Elvis, the Beatles, computers, and everything in between. The truth is that society isn't being "destroyed" at all, it's just changing away from what you were comfortable with.

THat's not an argument, it's a rant against "conservative old people", and it's borderline insulting. It fails to confront the assertion that modern technology is a cause of shorter attention spans.

I'm a "conservative (sort of) old (sort of) person (sort of)" and I love all this new tech. But you don't get all this stuff consequence-free.

I find I have to force myself to get out of the house to get away from my computer from time to time. Spend a few hours in the photo dark room, or ride a bike. I love browsing the web on my cell phone, when I'm stuck in a line waiting somewhere or riding a train or something, but I have to turn it off to enjoy the RL environment (real life).

 

[Ghostrider]

More than destroying our minds, I'm witnessing a loss of discipline in the investigative process. Whenever people seek out information, they google it and more often than not, they stop at the first results. If it's not on Google, it doesn't exist (which is bad, there are other search engines) and a good lot of users doesn't know about the advanced search operators.

It used to be that the effort dedicated to retrieve information and investigate something was time- and resource-consuming. You had to go to libraries, seek out articles on magazines and paper, photocopy them and take a metric ton of notes lest you forget anything and had to go back for that little item you might have misses. This is a culture that's being lost - like learning to frame a good picture on a camera because you can shoot as many pictures as you like or edit them afterwards.

I'm a conservative as well in the sense that as much as I love new stuff, it shouldn't replace useful skills learned along the way but rather integrate them. It's still important to know how to read a map, even if you have GPS; it's important to know how to properly get the shot right because no digital wizardry can still make you go back in time to redo that precious once-in-a-lifetime shot you missed because you didn't know how to properly take a picture; and it's VERY important to have discipline during research and investigation.

Don't let Google or anything else do the research for you. That's the problem with the internet or, rather, that's the problem with its mis-users.

 

[Izack]

Let's not forget the people who's only experience on the Internet is Facebook and Twitter and whatever else.
I'm all for emails and instant messaging (although I don't own a cellular phone and don't plan on it), but I cannot understand what it is that makes people want to spend their time telling everybody about every pointless little thing that they do. I like the Internet as the invaluable research tool it is (and it does take some time to do proper research even on a computer), and as a place to share information and ideas (such as this forum), and not as the cesspool of 'tweets' and counter-tweets most people see it as and use it for.

Sorry if this seems like a rant against social networking, but I fail to see a useful purpose in it other than yet another medium for stupid (for lack of a more eloquent descriptor) melodrama.

 

[Enjo]

Sorry if this seems like a rant against social networking, but I fail to see a useful purpose in it other than yet another medium for stupid (for lack of a more eloquent descriptor) melodrama.

Nah, social networks are evil. It's just that nearly everywhere else you'd be called paranoid or at least anti-social for what you said. Let'em have it. They generate more information noise so it's easier for me and you to hide in this noise.