What is the internet for?

Did it make you dumber?

Ironically, thanks to the probably greatest creation of modern mankind – Internet, I was able to catch up some of the good old shows on Netflix. As mentioned on one of my previous posts, I was addicted to the show Californication. Main character Hank Moody played by our good old David Duchovny from X files.

Not a secret agent this time round, he plays a washed up novel writer who got lost in the curse of Los Angeles. Caught in between women (literally and not), alcohol, drugs, and parties, Hank Moody and Californication might sound like a show about sex and every other vice but it's actually more than that. The character development of Hank is really good. He is so real and relatable, there's more than 1 dimension of him and that's basically how every human is. Not like your typical superhero nor villain from Marvel.

Anyway, before I digress any further, I would like to share one of his favourite quotes that got me thinking a little recently. He was on a radio show getting interviewed about his views of his blog (I know) and his view on the internet.

“People seem to be getting dumber and dumber. You know, I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it's really given us is Howard Dean's aborted candidacy and 24 hour a day access to kiddie porn. People... they don't write anymore, they blog. Instead of talking, they text, no punctuation, no grammar: LOL this and LMFAO that. You know, it just seems to me it's just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people at a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the King's English.” 

I guess the Internet hit him a little harder considering that he is a wordsmith. The way we are, in his words, pseduo-communicating, ain't exactly his thing. As much as the Internet has given us knowledge and so much convenience but it just make us crave for more. We want things faster, we want things easier, and we want it all. We no longer enjoy those trips down to the libraries and flipping through the old archive newspapers to look for information but instead we just key in a few text into google and hope to look for the answers. Google is making searches easier by the day with SEO and SEM and we are so lazy that we do not even browse through the 2nd page of search results.

We rely so much on technology and internet these days we no longer appreciate the little things of life. We no longer read or information, we do not memorize things because everything can be pulled out off the internet with our 4 fingers wank machine. We relay on it so much that we can't even memorize our own home phone number. Of course, spell check is saving my life on a daily basis.

Invention and creation is neutral on its own. Like I always believe that guns are just guns but it's the people that makes it dangerous. It can be used to protect people and at the same time hurt someone. The internet is just as much the double edge sword if not handled carefully.

One of those major concern looming around the internet has been the whole fake news thingy. That aside, I haven't been the biggest fan of the internet recently. We started Unscrambled.sg with the goals of explaining some of the things that matters to people in plain English because we know how lazy people are when it comes to reading. That includes myself. I'm never big into reading until recent years. Sadly, instead of the positive messages that are within each piece of articles or news put out on the internet, people seem to always be able to pick out things that ain't supposed to be there.

I was relatively disturbed by a recent incident. A girl was killed in an accident, she fell off the building while she was trying to get back into her locked room. Somebody died, somebody is grieving for sure but the internet doesn't have enough empathy and EQ to give the family and friends just that. The comments were mean, it's silly, people were just trashing her without giving much thoughts. People think that just because they are hiding behind a screen they have no responsibility and can say whatever they want. My point is, would anyone of them dare to walk up to the family or the victim herself and say what they had said on the internet? If they do not, why are they doing it online? Simply because they think they could get away with it? This is just one of the many incidents that I've encountered recently. Will we be so used to what we do online without consequences that we just start doing things that we probably wouldn't have even thought of if not for the internet?

Like I said, the invention itself is neutral but how it changes us is yet another story.

Sometimes I just wish for things to go back to simpler days. That sentence alone is making me sound like 10,000 years old.