The Internet: Good or Bad?

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It's morally neutral, often slow, filled with so much junk and literary fluff that it makes it more annoying than useful sometimes. I lived without internet and cell phones for my childhood. Still had videogames and computers with games and encyclopedias, which seemed a bit more useful then. Being able to communicate with lots of people is cool, but annoying when the only person you want to speak with still isn't speaking with you and in that way it's just another way to be hurt by silence. It's nice to have access to the outside world if one is trapped by logistics and can't visit anywhere they want to go. It's mix. The internet is just a medium and the content is what's good or bad.

My summary of the Internet

Facebook = bad

WP = good

Internet's impact on employment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5puB_7Q2n74

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCvf2DZzKX0

I became an adult long before the Internet existed for the average person. If I may offer a few observations?

- The Internet is much more than facebook or WrongPlanet. Much of the commerce now possible occurs because corporations have a cheap, secure (enough) means to transfer and synchronize data. Everything from online shopping that is paid with a few clicks to those purchases at the checkout where you slide a card in the little reader box. Paper checks are now an annoyance to banks as paper money is to consumer commerce.

- Before the late 1990's - early 2000's, when the Internet became familiar to many people, people on the spectrum were isolated. Like many other people with attributes that were at the end of the bell curve, our only source of information was our likely misinformed local authority figures. Doctors, teachers, pastors...people who really had no clue. We were often institutionalized because we were misunderstood. But then something amazing happened! Suddenly we were able to find each other, all over the world, and compare notes. As were parents, some of whom already had enough social privilege to enact change. And doctors, and educators. And we all realized together that autism is not a moral failing, it's not a matter of laziness or disobedience or psychopathology. It is the autistic spectrum , normal (if somewhat rare) attribute of humanity.

Please throw my vote in the "Internet = Good" bucket.

I'll say this as well, I've been on a reading binge for a good 3 1/2 years and it's been fueled in part by my own inquiry but a lot of it as well has been other people's research, enough recommendations on different topics and then those books leading by reference to other authors, other books, so on, etc. etc.. Seems like no matter what you want to study, if you want to study it, you can indeed separate the wheat from the chaff if you're serious about going there. I think that's one of the ways people can really use it productively - ie. you aren't stuck reading the local paper or watching one of the big 5 or so news sources for your news, you're able to find out who the greatest minds in physics are and where to find their stuff, you can find the greatest artists and poets and narrow it right down to the people who seem like they're speaking, drawing or painting our life, you can find music that seems more you than you and taken farther than you could have ever imagined it (this AND all kinds of lectures by the physicists, biologists, etc. free of charge on Youtube), and if you're into discarded knowledge the whole pile is yours from antiquity to 1940 or 1950 either for free pdf download and if not it's usually $.99 or $1.99 on Amazon kindle.

Just on that account I think it almost takes a lack of perspective to be chronically bored. If you really consider what we have at our finger tips it's amazing and it's enough to keep you occupied well longer than one life could endure.

i love the internet.