Life as we know it began 48 years ago when scientists at the University of California, Los Angeles transmitted a message — Lo — to a server 350 miles north at the Stanford Research Institute (they were going for Login, but the system crashed at g). The researchers wanted to collaborate with one another without knowing where, or even who, the other person was. It was this essential network that would become the Internet, and later, the spark to a global information age.
We are now in a situation where we can evaluate what impacts the Internet has had on society.
Certainly some of them are good — transcendent and transformative, it adds new perspectives. It empowers science, foreign commerce and humanitarianism. It brings convenience, connectivity and truth. And best of all, it’s all yours…
But not without cost.
The Internet doesn’t deliver benefits without peril — with convenience comes security risks, with truth comes convoluted information, with global dialogue comes divisive rhetoric, with a focus on the self comes too much focus on the self.
Online, people lie. They say hurtful things. They share things they shouldn’t. They pose as others. They steal. They spy. They hack.
In this way, researchers most original intentions of anonymity might just be the Internet’s modern day pitfall. It lacks accountability, and with that, many of the physical interactions that typically restrain behavior vanish when one acts through a screen.
Taking advantage of obscurity, many use it as a platform to propel false information. Such lies push ideological ends, damage reputations and, as the fake news torrent has shown us, fallaciously influence public opinion.
Despite this negativity, our lives continue to become more and more engulfed in and reliant upon technology yet we never stop to question it.
A digital you
The line between the real you and a digital representation of you is becoming less and less distinct. Though connectivity promises to make life more convenient, it also jeopardizes the security of information — anything stored digitally can be stolen, manipulated or destroyed.
Though cyber criminals hack with a variety of motives, profit is typically the driving force. Similarly complex are the many ways by which one could carry out a hack. The term has become synonymous with a range of actions and can refer to anything from taking advantage of flaws in software to making a phone call to convince someone in an organization to do things they shouldn’t to seizing control of machinery used to run industrial complexes.
Whereas computer viruses only affect disks, cyber hacks affect objects. Regardless of circumstance, cyber is the perfect weapon — any person can remotely and inconspicuously take over digital information that controls physical objects, be it a computer, train, plane, power plant or an entire infrastructure system.
Me, me, me
I wonder about the relationship between the Internet and morality. Has it improved morality for the way it exposes users to a diverse marketplace of ideas? Or has it hindered common decency for the mental state it provokes in us?
A 2015 study by the Pew Research Center found that most agree with latter, though they did say the Internet has benefitted the realms of education, relationships and the economy.
From Hollywood to social networking to politics, you don’t have to look far to see evidence of narcissism in our culture.
Dr. Jean Twenge has spent years studying the societal rise of narcissism. A core finding of the psychologist’s work is that today’s culture is far more focused on the self — and less on social rules — than we were 50 years ago. Moreover, she argues that a culture of individualism is counterproductive to achievement and happiness.
One of the many factors Twenge investigated was the presence of individualistic language in American books. Looking for phrases such as “You can be anything,” “I am the best” and “You are special,” and words like personalize, me and mine, she found that individualistic language is much more prominent in today’s literature than it was in the past. This deviation indicates that a rise in narcissism goes beyond generational differences and is instead part of a broader cultural shift.
Our affection for building self-esteem and maintaining positive self views are good things, but only to a certain point. Most of us take for granted that in order to succeed you must have high self-esteem, but that’s not true — people who score high in self-esteem aren’t necessarily more successful than anybody else, according to Twenge’s research.
We often tell kids that they are unique and special, but they are the ones most susceptible to having their abilities impeded by an overload of self-esteem.
Those who build it up without actually experiencing the accomplishments and effort required to build self-esteem in a genuine fashion could become dissuaded from doing the things that would lead to achievements, since what psychological incentive do you have to work hard (and build self-esteem) when your self-esteem is sky-high to begin with?
Dr. Jim Taylor elaborates in a Huffington Post blog: “Certainly, the shift in societal values away from collectivism and toward individualism, away from civic responsibility and toward self-gratification, and away from meaningful contributions to society and toward personal success have also contributed to the cultural messages of narcissism in which children are presently immersed.”
Repercussions of the shift have already manifested in millennials. Despite no generational improvement in performance, millennials are much more likely than baby boomers to think they are above average compared to the rest of people their age.
Twenge’s studies show that millennials’ buoyant expectations for the future are often not met by the time they hit their 30s. It used to be that people over the age of 30 were happier than those in their 20s, and though they still are, it’s by a much smaller margin. Sky-high self-impressions collide with reality, and in that way act as a disillusionment, ultimately causing depression and other mental health issues in adulthood.
To avoid a self-serving life, Twenge recommends focusing not on how you feel about yourself but on what you do. It’s good to have faith in oneself, but there’s a fine line between confidence and overconfidence. To be overconfident is to have no careful reflection, self doubt or caution.
Technology like Apple’s iCentric Internet of me panders to the idea that It’s my world and you’re all just living in it — iMac, iMovie, iTunes, iPad, iMe, iEverything. It makes sense to associate self-centeredness with our becoming more and more accustomed to having all of our most trivial needs met by the net.
Ego aside, the Internet also does us a disservice for the way it endorses group think and echo chambers.
Humans filter evidence through our own biases and preconceptions. In having control over the information we receive, we are likely to gorge on what confirms our ideas and snub what does not. “Then we all share what we found with our like-minded social networks, creating closed-off, shoulder-patting circles online,” writes the New York Times’ Farhad Manjoo. We can see this manifesting in, for example, the intersection of politics and news media — the very same lines that divide voters now divide audiences.
I don’t know if technology has all the answers.
What I do know is that the Internet is an imitation of humanity; as Werner Herzog says, a representation of what is deeply embedded in ourselves.
In this way, it acts as a platform to propel both good and bad. For this reason, it is of the utmost importance that we maneuver carefully in virtual reality.
Set strong passwords, and don’t open emails from people you don’t know. Act as your own filter by being skeptical over the information you receive. Embrace the Internet to your heart’s desire, but not without first embracing the thought that in this digital age of unparalleled potential, unparalleled risk also lurks.
Austin Urban Post 