ickbad-blog

[ickbad-blog]

The internet and you: look what you've become

Gather round kids, it's time for old grampa Ickbad to tell you a story. Back in my college days, long ago in 2012, I had a speech class where we got choose the topic. I was in college for network engineering, and I had the idea that mankind was not mature enough for the internet (a strange topic for someone in I.T., but I'll get to that another day). I made the argument that the internet, while being generally useful and had a lot of good qualities to it, was also leading humanity down a darker road,

I made the aragument that while as a whole, we benefited from the internet, but the individual would suffer from it, and a day would come when the benefits would outweigh the cost and the internet would be detrimental to us. If your wondering I convinced no one and got a C on the project. If only I could go back and show them what the internet today looks like and what it's done to us, I feel like I could make a better case.

I'm going to step back in time some more, just to preface my argument a little and give some background to where I'm coming from (you can skip the next 4 paragraphs if you don't want to hear about my life). I grew up in the 90's, and I lived out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. I had a brother and sister that I fought with, and neighbors we were friends with. I remember running through the woods and finding bottle mines (dump grounds from a long time ago, where most of the garbage had broken down aside from glass bottles) and playing n64 inside. Flashlight tag at night and having bonfires in a fire pit out back. A normal childhood in the 90's (at least I think so, normal is subjective)

But my Dad was also in I.T., and because of his job we had a lot of old computers around and the internet. I grew up playing online with friends, downloading demos and free games to try out. But that wasn't the whole of my experience. I did not spend all day online, and was outside more then online. Then, when I was 12, I moved in with my Mom (they divorced the year before) and lost the internet. I spend the next 5 years not being online and got along just fine without it.

I feel like I was both ahead of the internet ad behind the times because of this split. I had the internet at a young age but not the years that most of my peers were online. I feel like this is why I have such a strange relationship with it, and technology in general, but you can form your own ideas, I don't control you.

Anyway, because I learned computers at a young age I was good at them, troubleshooting games and computer problems gave me critical thinking skills, and that's why I went into I.T. in college. But I never had a want to go online. In high school and college, when I did have the internet, I only had a myspace account to play games, and only last year had a personal facebook account. I used to be very active in gaia online, when that was a thing, but it was in it more to play the games that talk with people.

Back to the point, I feel like the internet is now at a point where it the harm it's doing to the individual is greater then the benefit to us as a whole. The collective of human knowledge and interaction available at our fingertips has begun to divide us and has brought a new age of apathy.

Going back to my story, I remember every Thursday my family would all get together and watch Survivor on TV. I remember staying home from school and watching The Price is Right followed by 7th heaven because that was the only thing on TV. I remember rushing to the bathroom or to do something on a commercial break and channel surfing to find something to watch when nothing was on. But now with youtube, netflix, and other on demand streaming services these things have gone away. No longer does watching something mean scheduling that time. We don't need to worry that there is nothing to watch when we can turn on anything we could ever want. We can stop and come back to something whenever we want rather then being constrained to 2 minutes of commercials. But is this strictly a good thing?  

I like those little wafer sugar cookies, and if I could I would do nothing but eat them. However there are consequences to that path as well, and while in the short term I may enjoy them, in the long term it's detrimental to eat only the delicious wafer cookies. I feel that the same logic can apply to media on demand. Now that we can watch whatever we want whenever we want, does the act of watching something feel less special? Growing up I watched Dragon Ball Z, and I remember everyday at school talking with my friends about what happened on the last episode, trying to guess what would happen on the next episode, and filling in who screamed the most to someone if them missed what happened. I feel like these conversations don't happen anymore. Now we only talk about the series as a whole and the excitement of watching once a week, or the heart break of missing an episode isn't there. And if you want to watch every episode of breaking bad in one go, well I don't think a sane person would agree with you but you have that option to stream every episode one after another. And as they come in to scrape you off the couch at the end and rush you to the hospital for any number major health complication resulting from doing nothing but watching breaking bad for 50 hours, you can tell them how great it was. I think I'll have another wafer cookie.

The ability to stream whatever you want also comes with another major issue (at least I think so), creating an echo chamber. Channel surfing wasn't something magical, but there were times when you came across something that you had never seen before, and you would have another show that you wanted to watch and follow. Watching tv when there was nothing directly you wanted to watch meant either looking for something new or giving up and finding something else to do. It would necessitate expanding your views and ideas to find enjoyment, and while I feel like that wasn't a big price to pay to find something new, I'm finding more and more people are unwilling to pay the price, or that there is no way to achieve this. I wish that netflix or hulu or any streaming site would set up a live TV option so when I don't know what I want to watch, I have the ability to surf around to see, and maybe find something new.

And speaking of echo chambers, I want to hit one more topic before I end this pointless rant no one will ever read, Echo chambers in online communities. There was a time where talking about something you wanted meant bring it up in conversation with people and competing with what they wanted to talk about. You may have had different groups of friends that you discussed different topics with (wouldn't bring up what sick fetishes you were into to your office friends), but there was still a diverse topics discussed within a group of people. Now however, there is a chat group or sub-reddit for anything, but trying to bring up a different topic in one of these forms is frowned on. So while there is a group for anything you want to discuss, there is little flow of new ideas outside of that topic in these places. This results in stagnation of someone's views and may even lead to people becoming intolerant to new ideas.

Let me give you an example; racism happens (at least in my point of view) because people are not exposed to different races and thus believe their race is the only good one while needing stereotypes to base their ideas of others. Then when they encounter these races, they have nothing to base their ideas on but these ideas of stereotypes and differences. Now think about this, the current political climate. I'm in the U.S., and the political landscape is a nightmare, and I have a feeling that it has more to do with liberal and conservatives each being in their own echo chambers to the point where stereotypes and misinformation is the only thing we have to judge each other. One side doesn’t trust the other and any notion of working together is all but gone.

Now, I can't blame the dumpster fire that is politics solely on echo chambers, but I do believe it is one of the reasons we are in this mess. I do have one other example of echo chambers gone out of control, and that is tumbler it's self. Without going into to much detail, I believe the current attitude going around tumbler (you know the one snowflake) is because the echo chamber of something that started out noble but was perverted.

Tumbler was a great place for fans and for the LGBT community to find a home. However, because of the echo chamber effects, things went down hill fast. Touching on the fandoms. People started out with fan pages of shows or whatever (I'll use shows for simplicity, but this is true for any fandom),  but then groups sprang up with different ideas about what being a fan meant. Want to portray someone from the show in a different way then exactly how they are, one group may hate the perversion of the character while another will welcome you with open arms. These sub-echo chambers where only specific views of a subject could be related sprang up and further limited the ideas that were exchanged.

On the other end, the LGBT community on tumbler has grown out of control with it's echo chamber, but I feel for a slightly different reason. People would post what they wanted on tumbler, and this gave LGBT people a voice and a chance to talk about themselves. Because LGBT people are in the minority (and yes, we are in the minority), they were different. When someone is different, there are people who want to emulate that to feel special (See black culture in the 90's and early 2000's). However because of the echo chamber effect, other new ideas were not introduced to give variety to the culture and it stagnated. However, people still want to feel different to stand out from the rest, so rather then taking in new ideas, they reinforced their own ideas. Things like gender identity came into the mix and suddenly everyone had to have their own gender to be different. Rather then taking a mix of ideas and becoming someone out of them, they limited themselves to only a handful, and because of that the differences had to be formed within those areas, creating and mutation views and ideas that further lock them into that view.

I didn't write this to be a comprehensive topic on the negatives of the internet, but just to express my feelings on some of the negativity that has come from it. I do believe the internet is the most powerful invention of mankind ever, but the power swings both ways. I'll come back to these topics at a later date and expand my views then, but I've ranted long enough. My final thought is this, the internet benefits society as a whole but negatively on the individual, and eventually the negatives will catch up.

[ickbad-blog]

The internet and you: look what you've become

gather round kids, it's time for old grampa Ickbad to tell you a story. Back in my college days, long ago in 2012, I had a speech class where we got choose the topic. I was in college for network engineering, and I had the idea that mankind was not mature enough for the internet (a strange topic for someone in I.T., but I'll get to that another day). I made the argument that the internet, while being generally useful and had a lot of good qualities to it, was also leading humanity down a darker road,

I made the aragument that while as a whole, we benefited from the internet, but the individual would suffer from it, and a day would come when the benefits would outweigh the cost and the internet would be detrimental to us. If your wondering I convinced no one and got a C on the project. If only I could go back and show them what the internet today looks like and what it's done to us, I feel like I could make a better case.

I'm going to step back in time some more, just to preface my argument a little and give some background to where I'm coming from (you can skip the next 4 paragraphs if you don't want to hear about my life). I grew up in the 90's, and I lived out in the middle of butt-fuck nowhere. I had a brother and sister that I fought with, and neighbors we were friends with. I remember running through the woods and finding bottle mines (dump grounds from a long time ago, where most of the garbage had broken down aside from glass bottles) and playing n64 inside. Flashlight tag at night and having bonfires in a fire pit out back. A normal childhood in the 90's (at least I think so, normal is subjective)

But my Dad was also in I.T., and because of his job we had a lot of old computers around and the internet. I grew up playing online with friends, downloading demos and free games to try out. But that wasn't the whole of my experience. I did not spend all day online, and was outside more then online. Then, when I was 12, I moved in with my Mom (they divorced the year before) and lost the internet. I spend the next 5 years not being online and got along just fine without it.

I feel like I was both ahead of the internet ad behind the times because of this split. I had the internet at a young age but not the years that most of my peers were online. I feel like this is why I have such a strange relationship with it, and technology in general, but you can form your own ideas, I don't control you.

Anyway, because I learned computers at a young age I was good at them, troubleshooting games and computer problems gave me critical thinking skills, and that's why I went into I.T. in college. But I never had a want to go online. In highschool and college, when I did have the internet, I only had a myspace account to play games, and only last year had a personal facebook account. I used to be very active in gaia online, when that was a thing, but it was in it more to play the games that talk with people.

Back to the point, I feel like the internet is now at a point where it the harm it's doing to the individual is greater then the benefit to us as a whole. The collective of human knowledge and interaction available at our fingertips has begun to divide us and has brought a new age of apathy.

Going back to my story, I remember every Thursday my family would all get together and watch Survivor on TV. I remember staying home from school and watching The Price is Right followed by 7th heaven because that was the only thing on TV. I remember rushing to the bathroom or to do something on a commercial break and channel surfing to find something to watch when nothing was on. But now with youtube, netflix, and other on demand streaming services these things have gone away. No longer does watching something mean scheduling that time. We don't need to worry that there is nothing to watch when we can turn on anything we could ever want. We can stop and come back to something whenever we want rather then being constrained to 2 minutes of commercials. But is this strictly a good thing?  

I like those little wafer sugar cookies, and if I could I would do nothing but eat them. However there are consequences to that path as well, and while in the short term I may enjoy them, in the long term it's detrimental to eat only the delicious wafer cookies. I feel that the same logic can apply to media on demand. Now that we can watch whatever we want whenever we want, does the act of watching something feel less special? Growing up I watched Dragon Ball Z, and I remember everyday at school talking with my friends about what happened on the last episode, trying to guess what would happen on the next episode, and filling in who screamed the most to someone if them missed what happened. I feel like these conversations don't happen anymore. Now we only talk about the series as a whole and the excitement of watching once a week, or the heart break of missing an episode isn't there. And if you want to watch every episode of breaking bad in one go, well I don't think a sane person would agree with you but you have that option to stream every episode one after another. And as they come in to scrape you off the couch at the end and rush you to the hospital for any number major health complication resulting from doing nothing but watching breaking bad for 50 hours, you can tell them how great it was. I think I'll have another wafer cookie.

The ability to stream whatever you want also comes with another major issue (at least I think so), creating an echo chamber. Channel surfing wasn't something magical, but there were times when you came across something that you had never seen before, and you would have another show that you wanted to watch and follow. Watching tv when there was nothing directly you wanted to watch meant either looking for something new or giving up and finding something else to do. It would necessitate expanding your views and ideas to find enjoyment, and while I feel like that wasn't a big price to pay to find something new, I'm finding more and more people are unwilling to pay the price, or that there is no way to achieve this. I wish that netflix or hulu or any streaming site would set up a live TV option so when I don't know what I want to watch, I have the ability to surf around to see, and maybe find something new.

And speaking of echo chambers, I want to hit one more topic before I end this pointless rant no one will ever read, Echo chambers in online communities. There was a time where talking about something you wanted meant bring it up in conversation with people and competing with what they wanted to talk about. You may have had different groups of friends that you discussed different topics with (wouldn't bring up what sick fetishes you were into to your office friends), but there was still a diverse topics discussed within a group of people. Now however, there is a chat group or sub-reddit for anything, but trying to bring up a different topic in one of these forms is frowned on. So while there is a group for anything you want to discuss, there is little flow of new ideas outside of that topic in these places. This results in stagnation of someone's views and may even lead to people becoming intolerant to new ideas.

Let me give you an example; racism happens (at least in my point of view) because people are not exposed to different races and thus believe their race is the only good one while needing stereotypes to base their ideas of others. Then when they encounter these races, they have nothing to base their ideas on but these ideas of stereotypes and differences. Now think about this, the current political climate. I'm in the U.S., and the political landscape is a nightmare, and I have a feeling that it has more to do with liberal and conservatives each being in their own echo chambers to the point where stereotypes and misinformation is the only thing we have to judge each other. One side doesn’t trust the other and any notion of working together is all but gone.

Now, I can't blame the dumpster fire that is politics solely on echo chambers, but I do believe it is one of the reasons we are in this mess. I do have one other example of echo chambers gone out of control, and that is tumbler it's self. Without going into to much detail, I believe the current attitude going around tumbler (you know the one snowflake) is because the echo chamber of something that started out noble but was perverted.

Tumbler was a great place for fans and for the LGBT community to find a home. However, because of the echo chamber effects, things went down hill fast. Touching on the fandoms. People started out with fan pages of shows or whatever (I'll use shows for simplicity, but this is true for any fandom),  but then groups sprang up with different ideas about what being a fan meant. Want to portray someone from the show in a different way then exactly how they are, one group may hate the perversion of the character while another will welcome you with open arms. These sub-echo chambers where only specific views of a subject could be related sprang up and further limited the ideas that were exchanged.

On the other end, the LGBT community on tumbler has grown out of control with it's echo chamber, but I feel for a slightly different reason. People would post what they wanted on tumbler, and this gave LGBT people a voice and a chance to talk about themselves. Because LGBT people are in the minority (and yes, we are in the minority), they were different. When someone is different, there are people who want to emulate that to feel special (See black culture in the 90's and early 2000's). However because of the echo chamber effect, other new ideas were not introduced to give variety to the culture and it stagnated. However, people still want to feel different to stand out from the rest, so rather then taking in new ideas, they reinforced their own ideas. Things like gender identity came into the mix and suddenly everyone had to have their own gender to be different. Rather then taking a mix of ideas and becoming someone out of them, they limited themselves to only a handful, and because of that the differences had to be formed within those areas, creating and mutation views and ideas that further lock them into that view.

I didn't write this to be a comprehensive topic on the negatives of the internet, but just to express my feelings on some of the negativity that has come from it. I do believe the internet is the most powerful invention of mankind ever, but the power swings both ways. I'll come back to these topics at a later date and expand my views then, but I've ranted long enough. My final thought is this, the internet benefits society as a whole but negatively on the individual, and eventually the negatives will catch up.