The Internet: Are we Smarter or Dumber?

This weekend the Wall Street Journal ran a pair of articles posing the questions: Does the internet make us smarter or dumber? The articles don’t focus on the individual but more on the human race as an entire population. I thought they were both very well written and more importantly, got me thinking about it. In the end i cast my vote and along with more than half of the WSJ readers I believe the internet makes us smarter.

Of course, after some thought I felt what I truly believe, is it makes us more knowledgable.

‘The world at your fingertips’ has never been a catchphrase more true than it is right now. In the May 31 issue of TIME magazine the cover story was on Facebook. The inside headline was “Friends without Borders.” Twitter gives us a constant stream of information, wikipedia provides us with a library of information proofread and factchecked by millions of people across the globe.

When I sit infront of a peice of 400 year old music like I did this morning wondering what it sounded like, YouTube provides me with a live performance in my living room.

Do i feel well informed? Knowledgeable? Smarter than I did last year? Last month? Yes.

I don’t subscribe to a newspaper. I read google.com/news. When I was growing up one of my clearest memory is seeing my dad sitting cross legged on the couch, a cup of coffee in one hand, the Wall Street Journal or the Sunday Chicago Tribune in the other.  And there is a classic aesthetic about that practice I’m sure will be missed as we push on into the world of digital information. My son will no doubt grow up with an image of dad crouched over a computer screen or reading the news off an iPad. Of course, my son also knows what VLC icons look like and where his favorite Pixar movies are kept on my desktop.

What do you think about all of this?

Our life on the internet

So i’ve been thinking lately about the internet and just how deeply invested in it we’ve all become. I think about how 20 years ago when people were hopping on USENET and IRC passing text back and forth no one really understood the permanence of that information. I’m sure most people like the fact that they can find logs of conversations, blogs, journals, photos, things that were posted to this world wide web over 20 years ago. However, not everyone I’m sure, is glad that other people can as well.

Years ago, society had a concept of a persons “Private life.” Their “Family life.” A concept of what happens behind closed doors is better off back there where no one can see it.

In today’s age of information / communication technology it’s different. Now, it’s all about transparency.

Facebook’s Open Graph  project is a perfect example of this thing, and of course, the lawsuits that have followed are a good example of why a lot of people still wish we had the quiet concept of a ‘private life.’

Moving past all that it makes me wonder about my generation of twenty-somethings who are currently working their way through higher-education, climbing corporate ladders, or in my case working like crazy for a part of the military. It makes me wonder what the permanence of the internet will do to us when we’re older. When presidential campaigns revolve around candidates being able to erase their history on the web, and news media spending days on Google searching up their 30-year-old subscriptions to adultfriendfinder or other mis-deeds. When police records can be found at the push of a button and redistributed instead of having to search through cardboard boxes in county storage rooms.

It’ll be interesting to say the least.

This blog is a good example for all of this. This, essentially, is one of the last big steps in an effort to re-invent myself from the stereotypical kid I was at 16 when I first started stamping the internet with my handle. Nine years is a long time. Since I first started writing angry rants againts rules and ‘the man’ and ‘religious oppression’ a lot of things have happened. In the last 4 years paticularly since I’ve really bothered to write anything on the net.  

 Since then I’ve gotten married (to an amazing woman), became a father (to quite an incredible boy), was promoted to a Noncomissioned Officer in the U.S. Army, became much more heavily invested in my role as a Public Affairs Specialist, and have become completely entangled in social media and new information communication technology. It’s been a wild ride. And despite my still hanging on to music,  video games, geeky activities, and a not-too small obsession with cinema, I feel pretty different from the ‘persona’ I invented for myself on the internet at 16.

So I suppose the permanence of the internet isn’t the real issue here. More or less that we understand that people change, grow, and evolve during their life. That life history is just that much more availble for people today than it was 30 years ago.

In anycase, I’m hoping to actually stick to writing this blog now, and hopefully it’ll help me in my future endeavors for proving my new-found sense of professionalism.

I’m still keeping my handle though. =) Somethings, you just can’t let go of.

Getting back into this

I am going to begin a crazy competition against my sexy wife at bumblesandlight.com to see who can rock the most awesome blogosphereing awesomeness.

More to follow.

Stay tuned!