Tuesday, July 07, 2009
The Internet is Pointless!"
Why are people blogging day after day, after day, writing down tidbits of their empty lives or mostly shallow analysis of problems they are far from understanding from within their isolated little spheres? Loneliness. Marketing. An attempt to transcend the own perceived meaninglessness - the overwhelming pointlessness amidst the endless ocean of life. Unfortunately when millions upon millions are blogging, one is just another anonymous part of a huge anonymous mass of faceless individuals - with a few (totally random) outstanding stars. Things like Twitter are even worse than blogging. Institutionalized shallowness. Often it seems to me that everyone is connected, which results in a witches brew of opinion and information leading to a dilution of quality and facts so deep and profound that ultimately the entire web becomes questionable. What is it for? Does it enhance our life or does it merely keep us from living? And does it have a value to realize that for anything you do, no matter how clever and talented you are, there is someone who already did it - and better so? I am seriously asking: would I perhaps be better off without the Internet? Maybe not professionally, but privately... There practically is nothing anymore I want to do privately on the Internet. Over the years it has become boring. And too hectic and commercial and it becomes increasingly difficult to filter valuable content from junk. Like Earth itself, the Web is drowning in garbage and gibberish, and we destroy real world resources causing real world emissions to keep this cycle of commercialized mental shit up and running at ever higher speed. The Web goes the same path as cable TV in the 80s. As Pink Floy then sang: “13 channels of shit to choose from...” but there is nobody home. Connected to billions, and yet totally alone. Nobody is out there. Brave new world. And someone out there already saw this coming 20 years ago, and wrote about it, much better than I could ever do...
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Why are people blogging day after day, after day, writing down tidbits of their empty lives or mostly shallow analysis of problems they are far from understanding from within their isolated little spheres? Why do ants do what they do? Why does the beautiful wild flower grow? Why was the The Bibliotheca Alexandrina built? Today, we are merely following in that code as above, free will. Its all in the genes.
ReplyDeleteA romantic answer. But the current view of biology about ants is a very reductionist one - that they basically are clever automatons. We may well be clever automatons as well. My boss likes to say after cponferences "We are still confused - but on a higher level".
ReplyDeleteAnyway - the Internet is not entirely pointless. It connects people and it makes information available to those who know how to search - and to evaluate their findings. It also gives voices to those who otherwise would not be heard. But - the Internet can be switched off, just like that, from one moment to the other - like the cell-phone net was switched off in Iran. And for quite a number of people the Internet has become an end in itself, the number of "net-addicts" being dramatically on the rise.
Now that we have a planetary communication system, the Internet, no one can stop it. No one can stop that march especially religion that has had a head start. My romantic answer to your "The Internet is pointless" simply helps to explain, the notion of "I think, therefore I am". We have graduating from simple/clever automatons.
ReplyDeleteOur planet is beginning to see the merits of doing things together as climate change, for example, keeps us all awake. What language would we use to understand the "god´s eye" view? Here is borrowing from ALBERT EINSTEIN.
"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is".
Those "net-addicts" IMO, are the true drivers, pushing the internet to its limits of doable and achieve-able.