wishing the internet would disappear

whenever a new medium comes along, people
naturally get caught up in the information—the “content”—it carries. They
care about the news in the newspaper, the music on the radio, the shows on
the TV, the words spoken by the person on the far end of the phone line.
The technology of the medium, however astonishing it may be, disappears
behind whatever flows through it—facts, entertainment, instruction,
conversation. When people start debating (as they always do) whether the
medium’s effects are good or bad, it’s the content they wrestle over.
Enthusiasts celebrate it; skeptics decry it. The terms of the argument have
been pretty much the same for every new informational medium, going back
at least to the books that came off Gutenberg’s press. Enthusiasts, with
good reason, praise the torrent of new content that the technology uncorks,
seeing it as signaling a “democratization” of culture. Skeptics, with equally
good reason, condemn the crassness of the content, viewing it as signaling
a “dumbing down” of culture. One side’s abundant Eden is the other’s vast
wasteland.
The Internet is the latest medium to spur this debate. The clash between Net
enthusiasts and Net skeptics, carried out over the last two decades through
dozens of books and articles and thousands of blog posts, video clips, and
podcasts, has become as polarized as ever, with the former heralding a new
golden age of access and participation and the latter bemoaning a new dark
age of mediocrity and narcissism. The debate has been important—content
does matter—but because it hinges on personal ideology and taste, it has
gone down a cul-de-sac. The views have become extreme, the attacks
personal. “Luddite!” sneers the enthusiast. “Philistine!” scoffs the skeptic.
“Cassandra!” “Pollyanna!”
What both enthusiast and skeptic miss is what McLuhan saw: that in the
long run a medium’s content matters less than the medium itself in
influencing how we think and act. As our window onto the world, and onto
ourselves, a popular medium molds what we see and how we see it—and
eventually, if we use it enough, it changes who we are, as individuals and as
a society. “The effects of technology do not occur at the level of opinions or
concepts,” wrote McLuhan. Rather, they alter “patterns of perception steadily
and without any resistance.” 3 The showman exaggerates to make his
point, but the point stands. Media work their magic, or their mischief, on the
nervous system itself.
Our focus on a medium’s content can blind us to these deep effects. We’re
too busy being dazzled or disturbed by the programming to notice what’s
going on inside our heads. In the end, we come to pretend that the
technology itself doesn’t matter. It’s how we use it that matters, we tell
ourselves. The implication, comforting in its hubris, is that we’re in control.
The technology is just a tool, inert until we pick it up and inert again once we
set it aside.

The content of a medium is just
“the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the
mind.”

~The Shallows by Nicholas Carr

 

I would recommend you guys read the book which I quoted above. It's a pulitzer prize finalist . "The Shallows - What the Internet is doing to our Brains" by Nicholas Carr

 

But is it really their true colours? Or are people being influenced by the websites they visit or apps they look at? As the saying goes, "Bad company corrupts good character". I've experienced this in my own life. I was never all that misogynistic and was shocked by the level of misogyny I encountered on porn sites. Because I kept visiting porn sites I started to embrace the very misogynistic ideas that I was shocked by. It's why I'm trying to quit porn.

I did a course at university a few years ago on revolutions and the first revolution we studied was the printing revolution. Beforehand I thought I knew everything about the Reformation and I quickly discovered I had heard the clean version of the story. I had no idea how violent and insane people got after reading the Bible. The apocalyptic stuff in the Bible drove people nuts.

 

One thing you have to take into account, though, is the irrational bias secular academia has against religion, particularly against Christianity. I can't tell you how many times I caught those academicians in hypocrisies, when dealing with both American conservatism (I don't think Brits understand how incredibly left-leaning our Constitution is, relative to European tradition), and in dealing with Christianity. They, like most humans, also have a bad habit of opining on things way out of their field and assuming they are correct because they are "educated." For example, I learned the causes for the American Great Depression, which impacted the entire world, are taught differently in history class than they are in the economics department. My own English Lit department would confidently explain sex and gender in terms refuted in a freshman biology class, or the machinations of governance contradicted by the PoliSci department.

The Reformation was definitely a hot mess and I definitely could learn more about it, but it was such a big phenomenon you'd have to use a multidisciplinary approach to understand it. That "reading about the apocalypse made people crazy" conclusion smacks of simplistic conclusions rooted in "previous generations were stupid," "religion is a form of insanity," and "I only studied long enough to find the answer I wanted" biases.

 

I must say I've never come across an anti-Christian bias in the curriculum. My university textbooks tend to approach all religions in a nuanced way. Now I will say certain biases come across in some of the lectures I've attended and students tend to approach subjects from a certain point of view in the discussions. When I said, "The apocalyptic stuff in the Bible drove people nuts" that was my interpretation of events. It seems to me what I got from the university was an account of happened when the Bible was printed. The Reformation is an interesting event because it was Christians (Catholics) vs Christians (Protestants). Growing up Protestant I was under the impression that we were the good guys and Catholics were the bad guys but studying it made me think the issue wasn't so black and white.