Who could have thought that there would be an endless supply of knowledge that you can access right at your fingertips almost anywhere in the world? The reasons for families to sit together and talk rightly thrown away along with the need for wood powered heat and using mainframes to talk to other people that need to contact. The internet is to blame and to thank for this being possible. For the current generation it is hard to remember the antiquated time before the internet arrived on the world stage. I remember most of my first experience jumping into this endless labyrinth of knowledge and distractions. I was 8 and my parents had begun preparations for this upcoming unknown called Y2K which now we look back and laugh. The idea that computers wouldn’t turn over their clocks because they hadn’t been told by humans that 2000 was a year and that every computer globally was going to crash is now such a completely ludicrous idea. But this was 1999 and everyone thought the world was going to end because of this malfunction of computers which would lead to the misfiring of nuclear weapons and what tied all of these computers including the ones in our homes together, the internet. I remember the dial tone of a modem as my dad let me on his computer for the first time and set me free on this web of confusion. I started out on his Netscape homepage and somehow managed to find games on the internet in the first 20min and so began my dissension deep into a world I have still yet to figure out.
The first thing I noticed at a young age and so did my parents was that as soon as they allowed me to have internet in my room for the first time they saw less of me. This destruction of the nuclear family was partially a result of the internet and holding children’s interest and if their interest changed all they had to do was relocate their attention to another webpage. Just as Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in his essay “Fire Worship” about the loss of family times because of the advent of the wood stove so has the internet stretched these family ties and times to new lengths. With the advent of instant messaging and online social networking people don’t need to leave their homes to talk to someone face to face. Along with the brain numbing effects of the television it was a staple in gathering the family in the same place, but no longer is this true with the internet giving us the full and endless access to any television program that we could ever want along with many other shows that are only available on the internet. Though this information highway should not be seen as all bad, for it has given us many helpful websites based on specific interests.
Youtube for example other than its many funny, crude, rude, or indifferent videos has a plethora of instructional, scientific, political, and many other intellectual videos to stimulate the mind. The internet has made it so that we no longer have to ask living people questions we may ask this inanimate all knowing being called Google any question we want, and if it doesn’t know the answer the answer doesn’t exist or this is how so many people think. Vannevar Bush a man known for organizing the Manhattan Project published an article in 1945 in The Atlantic Monthly titled “As We May Think” outlining his idea for ease of research among physicists that wouldn’t get to share research with their colleges. Well this has happened now with people being able to share new ideas and research on the internet we will have no use for Mr Bush’s idea of the Memex, we have Wikipedia instead.
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