Right from the word “go” we receive information, whether through our phones, computers, T.Vs, radio or word of mouth. Information and news dictates modern life. Without a phone or computer, you are almost non-existent. If there is a catastrophic event on one side of the world, the other will know about it within minutes and, no doubt, its T.V viewing for the night (maybe even a few nights) will be dominated by that event until it is quickly neglected in favour of a new one. This information is becoming more and more dense too - we want it quickly and concisely. Over the past few years we have seen the popularity of the “i” newspaper (a concentrated version of the Independent) grow and grow as we become more and more reliant on short bursts of information. Despite this, the newspaper industry is shrinking because it doesn’t meet the audiences’ preferences. A study made by the Newspaper Association of America on American’s habits when it came to receiving news found that 137 million Americans currently read newspapers in a typical week which is just over 40% of the population. This is pretty small considering that the same study saw that 145 million also read their news online and last year 43 million accessed online content through their phone or tablet. In 2012 alone, the mobile audience in America grew by 27%. 53% of newspaper readers in America are said to have Twitter accounts and 77% of those will follow links to news stories from there.
Online access has been a revolution in the way we receive news and information about the world around us. Where “trends” are constantly changing and where our attention is constantly drawn to something newer and brighter. This is partly blamed on the younger generation and its change in taste. Take the IPhone. My brother (14) inherited my IPhone 3GS (3rd IPhone) when I renewed my contract. It was good but not great. All of his friends had at least a 4S (because of their middle class affluence and spoilt nature) and he felt outdated. He recently was able to twist my parents’ arm into getting a 5C on a 20-something pound a month contract which amazed me considering I had a Samsung Monte at his age. This is also interesting considering the age gap between my brother and I is only 3 years. I remember when the IPhone was first released (2008) - it was “the dream phone” that I, a little younger than my brother is, could only dream of having. I remember the madness that was ‘Angry Birds’ and ‘Doodle Jump’. Six years later, I see kids around the same age as I was in 2008 (and younger) wandering around clutching an IPhone in their hand. In those six years there have been eight reincarnations of the phone and the first IPhone is seen as a primitive piece of machinery not worth anyone’s time.
Social media websites are constantly having to change too. I missed the MySpace phenomenon as most people my age did but I did witness sites like Bebo, which was at its height of popularity when I had just turned 11 and started secondary school. By my 12th birthday, Bebo was more or less obsolete, Facebook had taken over completely. By this point MySpace was almost completely dead as more and more people turned to Facebook to network with their friends. It is now just over five years since I got a Facebook account and I can safely say that I can count the number of “statuses” I have written this year on one hand. Twitter on the other hand - n roughly a month, I have “tweeted” at least 100 times on my account and many will have probably tweeted more. Half a decade on from when Facebook dominated the life of every school kid in the Western World, it has been replaced by a more concise and attractive successor (Twitter). As Kate Rose puts it, “Facebook is: ‘no longer “cool” for the younger generation - and probably hasn’t been for a couple of years at least.”. We love change, although Twitter is not yet as “popular” as Facebook, it is set to be. What people described as “the death of MySpace” five years ago is what people are describing Facebook as today. A year ago, Facebook had roughly 1.5 million more users than it does currently whereas Twitter has grown from 10 million users in 2012 to 15 million this year. Personally, I would not be surprised if my nine year old cousin looked at Facebook in a couple of years like I look at MySpace and Bebo. Maybe by that time Twitter will be dying. Who knows?
In the world we live in, if there is a shinier, newer version of something, that something is shunted to the side. This isn’t a new thing either. Recently there was a FineBros video released on YouTube where they got America children to get a Walkman cassette player to work and almost all of them failed. This is something that most adults would find to be second nature. I watched the video confused, how can people only a few years younger than me find something so difficult that I find so simple. Although Walkmans were no longer something of everyday practice in my childhood, I remember the days of listening to my brand new Busted CD on my super cool portable CD player - in the days before IPods were the obvious choice of music player.
What I am trying to say is that we are constantly being forced to adapt. Facebook was a revolution - we could constantly keep in touch with everyone we knew wherever we were. Twitter came along and, all of a sudden, you could follow celebrities and T.V shows and news channels (as well as your friends) and contact them all. By using Twitter, you were no longer limited to your friends’ information, you had access to the worlds’. We have such an obsession with “following” people that we follow on average 2000 people on the social network. Realistically, the average Twitter user cannot take in everything those 2000 people are telling them about but still we follow more and more people as we tweet more and more things and receive more and more followers in return. When you think about it, the whole process is actually pretty sinister. It seems that rather than us controlling this information (choosing when receive it and what to do with it), the information is controlling us. Most of us have to log on to the internet daily (if not more frequently) and then bombarded with notifications and trends which we HAVE respond to before carrying on with our lives. It is an information overload.
So what damage does it do? On the face of it, nothing at all. The ideals of the internet was that we now had the ultimate resource that would link the world together and obviously social media websites prove that that (to an extent) is the case. This year the World Wide Web reached its 25th year yet only 34% of the global population have access to it. So that ideal of connecting the world hasn’t really succeeded. We have succeeded in linking the Western World which is ridiculously wealthy and fortunate but have also succeeded in ostracising “developing countries” with our rapid with our rapid technological advances. Arguably, rather than bringing the world together, the internet has pushed the world apart. The “developed” world and the “developing” world are probably further away from each other than they ever have been.
As a resource, the internet has been incredible tool that has helped commercialise and capitalise the Western World as well as educate us and enrich us. Not only do we have sites link Wikipedia and Google which act as a means of obtaining information, we also have sites that offer us games and cat videos which by themselves are a nice form of entertainment but together they have had a considerable effect on society. As we turn to technology, traditional forms of entertainment are again pushed to one side. As we saw with the newspaper earlier in this essay, the book is also a dying art. A study in 2012 saw that 17% of children in Britain would be embarrassed if their friends saw them with a book. A more accurate comment to the statistic above is that children would be embarrassed to be seen with a paperback. These children less than ten years younger than the generation of kids that queued to buy the Harry Potter novels on the day of release and read it with their sponge and custard at lunchtime. I will hold my hands up and say that I am probably contributing to the death of the paperback as I am the proud owner of a Kindle and in some cases I prefer the e-book to its predecessor. The truth is, many people find the size of a tradition paperback, in the world of streamline laptops, phones and tablets, a nuisance. Children find a tablet more desirable because, yes you can read on it if you want to but you can also play games and socialise and an IPad is probably a lot better looking than a copy of ‘Order of the Phoenix’. Despite this, what child is going to choose a book over Clash of Clans or Candy Crush? Less and less people are turning away from the monochrome world of words on a page and going towards the world of animation, colour and graphics. Does this mean that the great works i.e: Shakespeare, Dickens and Austen will soon be forgotten?
It doesn’t help that the internet is so vulnerable. Just last month we were faced with a huge moral panic about how a huge virus was going to hit 1 million machines worldwide and potentially clear their bank accounts. This has been a threat that we have faced since the internet began. Probably the biggest panic was caused by the turn of the new millenium which was blown completely out of proportion by the media around the world. Most of this was caused by either malicious hackers or by faults in the engineering of the system but last year we were faced the reality of government monitoring. After Edward Snowden leaked evidence of American institutes such as the NSA spying on millions of us via websites such as Facebook and Google, there was a huge outcry about the world’s privacy and what that actually means. Some consider Snowden a hero and others consider him a traitor although he considers himself to be “neither traitor or hero. I’m an American.”. He is currently seeking asylum in Russia as many members of American government believe he should be tried for treason if he returns to America. Many people were outraged by the NSA’s Orwellian methods including Tim Berners-Lee (the inventor of the World Wide Web) who said that their actions were an “intrusion of basic human rights that threatens the very foundations of democratic society.”. Many said that the NSA’s surveillance goes beyond George Orwell’s imagination when he wrote ‘1984’. It is incredibly unnerving that the American government may be reading this essay right now (I am writing on Google Drive so I wouldn’t be surprised). A lot of Snowden’s revelations have led to the discussion of internet censorship. Many see this as (again) another step towards the dystopia that Orwell described in ‘1984’. Earlier this year, David Cameron announced a “porn filter” which he plans to start inforcing through British broadband. Although porn is a problem on the internet with much of it being degrading to the participants and illegal, the idea of not watching it being an “unavoidable choice” is startling. How long before the same technology is used for other means? How long is it before a fairly innocent porn filter from a centre-right government turns into a mirror image of North Korea. Yes, that is a very extreme exaggeration but it is a serious issue.
So again, I ask the question is this damaging? Yes, although it is informing and enhancing our lives in many ways, that information is potentially being monitored and censored. Although we can apparently find anyone on the internet, ⅔ of the global population are yet to log on. I do not believe that Tim Berners-Lee imagined anything close to the tool that we take for granted everyday when he developed the World Wide Web and he has shown that he finds censorship and surveillance to be wrong and an intrusion of privacy. In the two and a half decades we have had internet access we have paid so little attention to how it is run and the effect it is having on society that now we face huge challenges. On the face of it, the internet and all things associated with it is an incredible resource but when you scratch beneath the surface you uncover some dark truths.
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