Networked Society “On the Brink”

“We’re the last generation to grow up in a dumb society, where things were stupid and uninteresting”

This short video is fascinating because it basically predicts the technological take over of the world and spouts crazy stats like that 57% of people talk more online than they do in person. Although there are some awesome technologies in bloom, the risk of losing human connections seems pretty huge here, and that it what makes me so skeptical. There’s always been a fear about turning humans into mere machines, but this is different—more like turning humans into mere digital personalities and literally forgetting that they have bodies attached to them. I like the options available to me for connecting with people worldwide, but I don’t see that as an excuse for not being connected in real life. Someone in this documentary said that all this internet connectivity is helping humans be what they are, by which I think he meant social. However, I think this is anti-social in that it takes us away from tangible human social interactions and turns them all into abstractions. And finally, there’s this false assumption that connection via the internet is democratic because anyone can access it, but I’ve overheard in my liberal arts classrooms that we’re beginning to see the world stratified into who has internet access and who does not, and the varying degrees in between like what devices they can use and where they can use them and how fast their connections are. This is going to be an interesting journey into the future.