Why I think the Internet is the best invention

I hope the following doesn’t sound *too* cheesy, but it’s something I feel very passionately about. I think the negativities of the Internet are all too often over publicised, whilst the positives are rarely highlighted. When we look back on past events, the apartheid, gay discrimination, the holocaust… it makes us wonder how people we as a society could let these sorts of things happen. I guess the problem was bias. People formed decisions based on what the government told them. The Internet is a contrast to this bias, with people from different backgrounds and cultures living all over the world writing about things that are important to them. So if there ever was a greater opportunity for peace, I believe its in the Internet.

Saving the Environment

Google’s decision to turn their homepage black in tribute to Earth Hour’s campain to get people to turn their lights off for an hour was instrumental in spreading the word about the event. Google is one of the most visited websites on the planet, with many millions of impressions every hour. Normally, they would mark an event such as this by changing their logo. But by making the change so obvious, they dramatically raised public awareness about the event in very little time. It wasn’t long before people were asking each other why their favorite search engine was suddenly inverted, and as a result, learning about the campaign. It would be interesting to know just how much of an impact Google has made by doing this.

We Live in a Beautiful World (^yeah we do, yeah we do…^)

Before I started using Flickr, I saw my camera simply as way of capturing images to preserve their memories. Since signing up with Flickr, I see it increasingly as a communication tool, and a form of expression. I’ve always been interested in photography, partly due to my photographer granddad rubbing his influence on me, but I feel Flickr has given life to the images in a way that I’d never considered was possible. They’re no longer static images pinned on my wall, they’re searchable, taggable, geographical-able(!) snapshots of whatever the day has to show me. I appreciate the world so much more, I’m eager to capture the way a lake scatters the sunlight, the texture of a growth of jade-green moss, or the way something as regular as an electricity pylon can look so geometrically beautiful. By sharing these images online, I feel as though I can give others the motivation to look at the world differently, and by looking at the work of some of the professionals, it suddenly hits home to me (as cliche as it sounds) just how beautiful the world really is.

Freeing the People

The situation in Tibet is the most recent of a series of events that would not normally be possible to be publicised. Without the Internet to publicise what has been going on, I’m sure the outlook for the protesters would have been very poor. But with the whole world watching, China has been pressurised to play nicely. Yes, it could be better, but it could be a whole lot worse. Journalists may be banned from entering the area, but these days, everyone can be a journalist. Censorship is also rife, but the Internet is steadily undermining the efforts made by dictatorship governments to stifle the voices of its people.

Spreading the Word

Before web 2.0, news could be spread through the Internet using emails. At the time, this way of communicating was seen as very fast. You could subscribe to a news website and get a daily summary of what’s going on in the world. But by today’s standards, apparently this is not fast or direct enough. People want to know about something as soon as it happens, not as soon as they can get round to checking their emails.
Then came RSS (really simple syndication) which made the delivery of content even faster. It’s like getting lots of little emails about things you want to know. Now people can find out about almost everything they want to know, in the same place, as soon as it happens. But even now, this doesn’t seem fast enough.
Twitter makes it possible for people to get these updates, and updates from their friends, on their mobile. The media whore is no longer chained to their PC. The information is sent to them wherever they are in the world.

Forging Peace

But Twitter is not primarily about receiving news feeds instantly. It’s about the non-journalists, the microbloggers who tell us what they ate for breakfast, what their cat is doing, and what’s pissing them off at that moment in time. So why does this matter? It matters because these people are real. They could be living in Sydney, Paris, Luxemberg, Tokyo or Somalia. So when something happens where these people live, we suddenly care so much more than if it were a place we’d never heard of. It matters because it makes us realise that the world is small, unique place, and what happens in it could affect our friends.

Distributing Aid

It’s all too easy to watch starving children in a faraway place on the news. We’ve become desensitized to the effects of bombs in the Middle East, and it doesn’t seem like our problem. But imagine being able to talk to the people affected by these events. Schools in the UK are encouraged to have video conferences or conversations over the Internet using applications such as Skype with children in schools in Africa, South America and the Far East. The problems don’t seem so distant any more.

For someone working with the Internet every day, sometimes it can be easy to take it for granted. But I try to remember just how special it really is.

Monday, March 31st, 2008 at 1:49 pmand is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

One Response to “Why I think the Internet is the best invention”

Amanda Says:
April 12th, 2008 at 1:56 am
Wow, I’ve never really given any of this much thought, but you’re right, the positives of the internet aren’t highlighted enough. Not to mention, the amount of knowledge that people pick up in general from the internet.