Has the internet ruined society?

[Username taken]

Not really. If anything it has made it better.

We are aware of bigger issues that we wouldn't have if there was no internet. Also social aspect of it is good.

Just minority of people who use it wrong and make it worse for everyone.

Quoted for the purest form of truth.

[DrNewGod]

There are no absolutes in this question, and we won't truly know the answer for a while yet, likely decades.

Unquestionably, the internet has opened western society to forms of assault on its security - both foreign and domestic - which we have not yet figured out how to counter. Responding to such threats may turn out to be one of the most corrosive impacts that democratic institutions have faced -at least, in The US - since The Red Scare.

[seismic-2]

Dunno about as a society as a whole, but personally: I started using the Internet (or the ARPAnet, as it was then) in 1975. I have found the last 43 years online to be... a mixed blessing.

[Jack Dracula]

Social upheaval typically follows any new development in mass communication. Ultimately, I think people will believe the positives outweight the negatives.

[Tuck]

Most of the responses in this thread make me think people didn't watch the video.

[Adam Allen]

Most of the responses in this thread make me think people didn't watch the video.

How so? What is it you think so many people are not getting, about the video?

[mrbrklyn]

The internet, has helped expose problems within society: it is a place with near endless data on our peoples, current and from the past, global knowledge is available to all, to learn from, to gather a stronger sense of perspective on society as a whole.
So no, society is not ruined by the internet. But its flaws are more exposed than ever before, and due to the decentralised nature of the internet, we are free to build a new one if we wish, thread by thread.

I see no problem. We have been perfected

[marvelmaniac6169]

It is called progress...

Same things probably happened to varying degrees with the Advent/Invention of...
The Pony Express, The Telegraph, The Telephone, Photography, Flight, Radio and Television, they all made the country and world a smaller place with more info available to the people weather it be real info or "fake" info.

[Tuck]

How so? What is it you think so many people are not getting, about the video?

Anything.

There's a lot of rebutting of points that the video doesn't make.

The video is concerned with self-sorting into echo chambers, the internet's inability (and lack of interest) in concerning itself with the quality of information (or its validity) it produces, and data showing that internet activism actually makes people complacent and that the net has led to change primarily by it's loss.

[mrbrklyn]

It is called progress...

Same things probably happened to varying degrees with the Advent/Invention of...
The Pony Express, The Telegraph, The Telephone, Photography, Flight, Radio and Television, they all made the country and world a smaller place with more info available to the people weather it be real info or "fake" info.

No, this level of thought control, survailence and human trafficing is not presedented by anything else

[9th.]

No, humanity has always had an ugly side. The internet just makes it visible

[mrbrklyn]

[Buried Alien]

Dunno about as a society as a whole, but personally: I started using the Internet (or the ARPAnet, as it was then) in 1975. I have found the last 43 years online to be... a mixed blessing.

The first twenty years were not like the most recent twenty.

Buried Alien (The Fastest Post Alive!)

[mrbrklyn]

https://hbr.org/2013/06/your-iphone-...-secret-police

And while whistleblowers are being strung up, journalists are being hunted down, too. The DoJ secretly obtained two months of telephone records of AP journalists. Similarly, Fox News reporter James Rosen went from being a journalist to an “an aider and abettor and/or co-conspirator” in order to get a subpoena for his private email account. As the New Yorker pointed out, it was “unprecedented for the government, in an official court document, to accuse a reporter of breaking the law for conducting the routine business of reporting on government secrets.”

And we haven’t even touched on the topic of Wikileaks. Despite it taking on the role of a publisher, using the power of the internet to avoid the requirement of a legacy print business, it wasn’t long after it started peeling back all these layers of secrecy that it was denounced by some as a terrorist organization. One might wonder how the East Germans would have reacted to such an organization? Perhaps Lenin, who had a 19-meter statue erected of him in Leninplatz in Berlin, might offer us some clues to as the way they would have thought about it: “Why should freedom of speech and freedom of the press be allowed? Why should a government which is doing what it believes to be right allow itself to be criticized? It would not allow opposition by lethal weapons. Ideas are much more fatal things than guns. Why should any man be allowed to buy a printing press and disseminate pernicious opinions calculated to embarrass the government?”

It’s a line of reasoning that befits a failed surveillance state. And yet today, is remains all too familiar.

Yesterday, when news of the PRISM program leaked into the public domain, two items struck me. The first, from the New York Times: “The defense of this practice offered by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, who as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee is supposed to be preventing this sort of overreaching… said that the authorities need this information in case someone might become a terrorist in the future.” And then, there was this, from the Washington Post: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”

[mrbrklyn]

https://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2484676,00.asp

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The Internet of Things: a Surveillance State in Disguise
The Internet of Things is just bringing us closer to a 24/7 surveillance state.