WWW: What, Why, and Who cares?

Image jacked from interwebdesigns.com, I'm sure being the wonderful and merciful organization they are, they won't come after a community college student for stealing a pic or two...

On the Internet

I have a very conflicted view of the internet, and the direction technology has taken in general. There is always the good and the bad, so is the world wide web basically a good creation with some bad qualities or an evil creation with a few redeeming features? I'm not here to tell youm I can't even decide for myself. The negative side is that the internet makes the world smaller. We are able to communicate instantly with people across the globe. Then again, this is also the positive side. We're able to insantly communicate with people across the globe. I feel like the web robs many people of their youth. I'm not old by any standard, but it seems like my generation has been forced across a gap. I remember when I was a little kid, playing with toy guns and running around with physical objects. For birthdays, whoever got that cool new action figure or, good forces willing, a bicycle or something, they were the envy of the block for a while. Now, I look at my younger sibling, who I'm only 5 years apart from, but the paths our childhoods took are lightyears away from each other. He was brought up on video games, computer games, and the internet. It is crazy how different we are. He speaks in languages foreign to anyone I know, he's passed watersheds of vulgarity and violence that in the past have been reserved for wartime soldiers.

The internet isn't evil, though. I can't tell you how many times I've needed or wanted to know what something is/means, and BAM. There it was in a second. The internet provides new communities to belong to, just look at the networks forged in sites like MySpace, webrings, various online groups, etc, etc... The internet provides an invaluable resource, and although not all information is accurate, most of it is at least entertaining. What is scary is how dependant people are becoming on the web. If my email provider suddenly up rooted and left, I'd be pretty screwed. I have personal documents, business correspondence, evidence of transactions... Having full access to the internet is like living in two worlds at once. The computer has become an alternate universe. A person can now sit at their computer and shop for anything, meet people, date, read, watch movies/news/whatever, play games, learn, and in almost every sense of the word, live. That's scary because it's new, because it's almost too much freedom for any sentient being to handle at once. Behind the shelter of the screen you can be almost anyone you want to be, do anything you want to do, and that's scary.