Is the Internet Broken? How Technology, Social Media and AI Changed Us

Is the internet broken?  What would your answer be?  My knee-jerk response, with little to no reflection, is “bloody hell, yes”.  Yet giving it a little more thought, I think my response is more likely to be “it’s as broken as you want it to be”.  Throughout history, we have had cultural revolution after cultural revolution – and whether our distant ancestors would like us (or vice versa) if we were to somehow meet, we’ll never know. My guess is that they would be bewildered by us, frankly.  Yet each new development presented different opportunities to different people.  Take literacy – after its development, some wrote poetry while others scribbled graffiti on walls (Pompeii is a great example, where it survived unlike the scrolls the poetry was written upon).  Then there was television.  The BBC (which made this video) set out to inform and educate the masses, while the commercial channels quickly got the upper hand (viewer wise) by bestowing us with gifts like the soap opera and the advertising break.

And then, of course, there is the internet.  On one hand, we have the likes of Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) who wish to disseminate and make available knowledge that in terms of its accessibility, our grandparents could only dream of.  Now we can settle arguments in a second, a few clicks and swipes…  but fifty years ago, if you were debating the name of the capital of Mongolia, and you didn’t happen to have an encyclopaedia to hand, the correct answer would take a while to ascertain.  You get my drift.  On the other hand, we have a host of companies trying to sell us their product at any cost, social media turning our children into slavering zombies and artificial intelligence, which isn’t always right and doesn’t care either way.  Add engagement algorithms into the mix and perhaps the tool had become the master…

There’s a clip in the video below about just that, really.  When asked about the internet by an interviewer “But it’s just a tool, isn’t it?”, David Bowie responds with: “No it’s not. It’s an alien life form”.  Perhaps he could have added “intent on world domination not by death and destruction but by stealth and seduction”.  The video features interviews with several people who know what they’re talking about, including Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales, Hatelab director Matthew Williams, author (whose novels are free on Project Gutenberg so he puts his money, as it were, where his mouth is) and activist Cory Doctorow. There are also some students at the University of Cardiff, who seem equally as baffled and bewildered by both the past and the present, bless ‘em.

Let me stop babbling. Have a look at the video.