Quote:
Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl
In my experience, the Internet has increased poverty through displacing workers, increased unhappiness through spreading bigotry and prejudice, and has shortened lifespans through encouraging a more sedentary lifestyle. People are becoming more ignorant, not more educated, as even academics are allowing search engines to determine what they read. The promise of the Internet has been lost as everyone rushed to turn it into a commodity, and I doubt that many people know what was lost.
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Tell that to the poor farmer in Africa or India who now for first time has proper access to information on weather and growing tips.
Tell that to all the people in the poor countries that could not afford books for learning things but now can find information on the internet.
And so on.
I was recently talking to a person from the Phillipines who comes from a poor family, she recently graduated from college(less than a year ago) and got a relatively well paying job.
Before she could give the money to her family they did not even have electricity at home. She said that the most important thing to allow her to get accepted for and to get through studies was that she got a mobile phone with internet access about five years ago. That opened the world to her, with the internet connection she was able to find options, study, find information and so on without having to spend all the money that they did not have on the materials. Without it she would have been stuck back in her village doing some menial job like her parents.
And all that with having a really bad and used mobile phone for her internet device with only a short battery life and no possibility of charging it at home.
Having access to the Internet changed her world to one of great possibilities.
Now her progress has allowed her to help other members of her family to try to improve too and one of her younger brothers could recently enter college too with her support.
So while you seem to see only the bad sides, the Internet has also allowed a lot of good things around the world.
All new technologies have good and bad sides, and while some of the things about Internet are bad, the whole thing is way on the net positive.
That is not to say that we should not work to make the Internet better, We definitely should work for such both as individuals and as societies. Thus support of all forms to things like Electronic Frontier Foundation, fact checkers and more, specially by own activism is important for success in such.