Me in 1999: "The internet is amazing! It will bring the world together and break down barriers. We will be an enlightened people. Education for the masses!"
Me in 2019: "Was the internet a mistake? I never predicted echo-chambers, extremism and disinformation campaigns."
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Quite recognizable! Remember those academic papers from the 90s about the internet? A lot of them haven't aged well. How little did we know.
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In my opinion, it comes down to information being an extremely powerful thing. What's worth more than money itself? Information. What's more powerful than the largest atomic weapons? Information.
The internet is a culmination of that fact -- it cuts better than the sharpest ...
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I guess echo chambers, extremism, disinformation campaigns, etc..all these existed even before the internet and even outside the internet. But the internet became a bullet train to carry such faster.
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a good argument can be made that this is nothing new. We experienced quite a lot of the same issues due to proliferation of printing press. makes this point in the square and the tower. Printing the bible (democratising its information) did not make ‘priests’ of us all.
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I think that the most common use of the internet since inception has been to watch porn (as far as random polls I recall across time), so that should’ve given us a hint that it wouldn’t turn out as well as we thought.
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I think what really killed the 'break down barriers' aspect was tailored search results in Google. Instead of just seeing the most popular (in general), or most accurate result in search, you got what Google thought you wanted to see.
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I see it as an experiment with an unexpected result. The goal now should be to learn from it. twitter.com/tmichaels1/sta
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Replying to @tmichaels1 @revmagdalen and @BiellaColeman
The internet has been an experiment about human nature. The conclusion, in internet terms: I am disappoint.
‘Predicted a decrease in direct human interaction, increased isolation, and changes in the perception of reality.
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Tech only disrupts the status-quo, demanding a new state of affairs - for better or worse.
What we didn't anticipate back in the 90s - was that the disruption would accelerate so much that our existing social systems for collective understanding and decisioning would collapse.