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Old 09-24-2018, 08:48 AM   #31
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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Originally Posted by AlexanderHowl View Post
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.
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.
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Old 09-24-2018, 09:08 AM   #32
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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I have to set aside "beyond the preservation of democracy," because I don't count that as a benefit. Indeed, from my viewpoint, the worst thing about the Internet is that it has enabled the enhancement of democracy.
I am a great believer in democracy, as it has shown itself so far at least as the best of all the bad forms of government tried over the years worldwide.

But the democracy that has proven itself is not the "who shouts loudest" that we seem to have now, it is instead the democracy of people elected by an atleast semi informed electorate to represent them.

The current "shout loudly" is a huge step down from it.

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But looking at the economic aspects, I think it's clear that the Internet has moved the production-possibility frontier a long way outward, and has done so partly by accelerating the "creative destruction" process that Schumpeter wrote about. Over the past quarter century or so, we have seen a lot of long-established firms go down, and a lot of new firms move up. And the new firms in general couldn't survive without the enhanced communications and coordination that the Internet enables.
Very much so. The world has changed in a huge way due to those types of things.

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So I think that by doing away with that part you would be causing both a lasting impoverishment of humanity, and a short-term crash. I think I have to say that nostalgia for the pre-Internet world is like nostalgia for the pre-railroad world.
Or the pre-printing press one.

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I'd also note that the commodification of Internet users as audience isn't a radical change. Back in the early 1980s, I read a Marxist analysis of the broadcasting industry that said that what television produces is audience, which it sells to advertisers; the television shows were not "product" but "means of production"—or as we say now, if you don't pay, you're not the customer; you're the product.

And even earlier, we had Robert Heinlein's "If This Goes On—," which envisioned the control of the electorate by scientific mass marketing against which the ordinary person was helpless, perhaps inspired by the work of people like Bernays in the 1920s. If there are arguments against this, they also apply to the broadcasting industries, and perhaps even to newspapers, and surely to the use of mass media for political propaganda, preaching, or commercial sales (though the commercial uses might well be the least harmful).

Indeed, and newspapers got mostly most of their income from advertising too, not subscribers.

Also many newspapers were founded and run to push a certain agendas, so slanted reporting is nothing new to the internet, what has changed is that it is now harder to control such things with so many more possible parties involved in pushing wrong things.
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Old 09-24-2018, 09:40 AM   #33
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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What kind of idiot connected something that low-level to the internet?
*sigh* way too many idiots. They are not directly connected, but can way too often accessed by VPN connections or similar.
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Old 09-24-2018, 10:41 AM   #34
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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Also many newspapers were founded and run to push a certain agendas, so slanted reporting is nothing new to the internet, what has changed is that it is now harder to control such things with so many more possible parties involved in pushing wrong things.
On the other hand, having an officially approved and licensed press that is certified never to push wrong things is the same disease in a worse form.

"A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers; and its greatest strength is a free press, where 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers decide what is responsible." (Professor Bernardo de la Paz, in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)
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Old 09-24-2018, 12:07 PM   #35
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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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.
This. Getting curated reference material, making connections, and texting/email cover the bulk of the most gainful internet transactions, and doing them on low-grade channels and gear can actually be a protective measure, as the malwares are often too big to fit and choke themselves if they try to reproduce too much.
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Old 09-24-2018, 02:34 PM   #36
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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On the other hand, having an officially approved and licensed press that is certified never to push wrong things is the same disease in a worse form.
Indeed, one only has to look at things like the research of the propaganda during WW1 and WW2 to get an idea of the things.

The freedom for more people to publish their views is a good thing mostly, but he internet in itself does not guarantee such as can be seen with the extremely wide Chinese censorship.
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Old 09-24-2018, 03:04 PM   #37
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

A partial rejection of the internet could result from lots of paywalls, border keeping, and so forth. Instead of 1 world wide internet, you get lots of small networks, proprietary data, and so forth. This probably isn't the result of consciously getting rid of the internet, but of a number of bad faith breakdowns between various entities.



This is probably more likely as an alternate history (possibly of humans, possibly not) than a future history.
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Old 09-24-2018, 04:01 PM   #38
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

If a malcontent person got a hold of the "NSA backdoor" (or whichever three letter agency you like) to some of the backbone infrastructure of the internet and suddenly took it over with catastrophic effects, it'd be easy to understand slow adoption of the internet replacement.

Imagine that the "internet 2" adopts many of the security proposals that have been circulating for decades and so is a bit less convenient but much "stronger" in that many kinds of attacks are more difficult or virtually impossible. What isn't likely to change is the presence of software and hardware bugs, and the entire catastrophic takeover might this time merely be a catastrophic shutdown.

After the second incident, all access to the national network requires using the smart-card embedded in your citizen ID, and everything you do is automatically recorded and run through massive-data analytics to find anomalies and thought crime. People still use their networked phones, but a huge portion of the internet sees a continual decline into eventual oblivion.
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Old 09-24-2018, 05:07 PM   #39
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

<Moderator>
A reminder to keep this on topic and not to stray into current politics which is, as should be well known by now, not allowed on these boards.

Thank you.
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Old 09-24-2018, 11:37 PM   #40
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Default Re: Setting Ideas: Why Would a Society turn away from the Internet?

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*sigh* way too many idiots. They are not directly connected, but can way too often accessed by VPN connections or similar.
I remember reading a while back about problems with people connecting the wrong computers in nuclear pwoer plants to the internet.

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Originally Posted by whswhs View Post
On the other hand, having an officially approved and licensed press that is certified never to push wrong things is the same disease in a worse form.

"A managed democracy is a wonderful thing, Manuel, for the managers; and its greatest strength is a free press, where 'free' is defined as 'responsible' and the managers decide what is responsible." (Professor Bernardo de la Paz, in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress)
You act as if the internet magically prevents this from happening, rather then potentially allowing it to happen whilst appearing otherwise.

It also depends upon what you define as 'wrong things'. Are we talking about not pushing the party line? Or are we talking about failing to properly fact check their sources?
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