A media studies professor told me that the problem with the Internet was (1) people don't understand how it works so it depowers them further (2) there are a lo

A media studies professor told me that the problem with the Internet was (1) people don't understand how it works so it depowers them further (2) there are a lot of hidden environmental costs (3) quality of information is questionable because everyone can post anything, and (4) everyone thinks everything is a revolution: they thought that about radio, television, etc...how they were going to change our world and didn’t. Like the author of this article, she pointed to how select large corporations control the infrastructure. I responded in a presentation that: (1) Not everyone needs to know how medicine works in order to benefit from medicine, and it does improve our lives. It is a good thing that not everyone has to know TCP/IP, or the inner workings of browsers to use them. Further, unlike many other elements of our society, to learn and get involved in this one is a lot easier. (2) It’s true that silicon development, and waste from computer equipment is contributing to our environmental problems, and we should fix that, but that is a larger systemic paradigm problem we as a society have and is not specific to this industry (3) The problem of unreliable information exists with or without the Internet. That problem is tackled by people organizing who have shared interests, organizing to create certifications, show trust in others, build reputation networks, etc... this is the case outside of the Internet, and it is the case with the Internet as well. (4) The Internet is not going to be like television or radio, because it is fundamentally different. Although organizations like the FCC were designed to protect limited air waves from corporate control, they ended up doing the opposite, and even if they were doing a good job there would be a lot of hierarchical control. What we have on the Internet is something particularly incredible. The powerful organizations that control the infrastructure needed to build something that worked reliably, for many purposes, and although the reasons for this were originally military and such, what we have is something not hierarchical, something that you can become a node on, something that with very low cost of entry gives you the ability to distribute your content. Sure, most of this ability is used by many people to maintain their MySpace page, but that they can make it incredibly different. Further, browsers can modify the content being sent to them, the Internet allows groups of people to create their own communities, and their own sub-networks. Not all of our social problems, that we lie and try and manipulate each other, that we waste a lot of our time, that we produce a lot of a junk ... the Internet doesn’t make these problems disappear, but due to its remarkable difference from other mediums, as you all know, opens many incredible possibilities. When I did the presentation MIT’s Open Course Ware was still new, I recommended my university follow suite and make classes available in video, they haven’t but other schools have. Wikipedia is accessible in a lot of languages. I have been to third world countries, and it is a lot easier going to a cyber-cafe, which there is more so every year, than it is to go to the United States to get a higher education, or purchase books/find a library, and sift through the amount of books that would be needed to get this amount of information. A number of you agree that there is a lot of wrong, and time wasting information on the Internet, but just take a look at the site you’re on - through organization, that giant pool of information is being filtered. If you follow a link to MIT, you know the quality of the article is going to be better; it builds reputation with you, just as Hacker News gives you a greater feeling of quality than reddit. We can go further and build reputation systems that can be added as browser plug-ins, community based, or organizations accrediting... we can think of ways of making through lots of information, and even without the Internet we’d have that problem. Also, it’s unlikely that any time in the near future you’ll be able to go through some information source and just know it’s all right, before the Internet, and continuing into now that it’s here, you have to trust yourself foremost, and learn how not to waste your own time, and value sources that give you information that checks out with you. P.S. Recently at a dinner with a Sociology professor, I got the ‘Internet is going to kill us all’ shpeel again (she didn’t know I worked in the industry), and I’m realizing there’s two sides to this: people who think the internet is going to solve every problem magically (as opposed to being a tool to help us solve those problems), and those who think the Internet is going to destroy the world magically (as opposed to being a tool to help us destroy the world).