admin (PRO)I'd like to thank my opponent for doing this debate with me. This is a topic I am very interested in and have done a lot of research on over the few years I've been around, because the internet is the single most fundamental revolution of our age, and because society is so important to our existence.
I have the BOP in this debate. And I intend to show that the internet is not only currently undermining our society, but that this will get worse in future if action is not taken.
The internet is not real life
The root of this idea is older than the internet itself. In his book "Simulations", the philosopher J. Baudrillard explained that networked technology - usenet groups and such - were essentially a Disneyland. They could simulate real society, but only in the sense that Pirates of the Caribbean simulates real-world piracy. Elements become distorted to suit the narrative society wishes to create. This is a natural consequence of aspirationalism regarding the internet and computers in general. But this creates an inherent problem - the simulation of reality that is the internet is an illusion of reality, just like Disneyland is nothing but an illusion of reality. Everything that Disneyland fundamentally represents is fake - so it is true of the internet.
I'll make a case in point: my own Facebook page. I have a very nice picture of me standing, smiling, on a beach. Do I look like that every day? Of course not. It's just the image I want to show the world. Have I really only had 14 photos taken of me? Do I really have precisely 256 friends? Have I really never watched a movie? No way to all of the above. Those are just products of a simulation called Facebook, which is itself part of the Disneyland of the internet, when given the input of me in real life. What comes out is a funhouse mirror version of me, where I have a lot of friends and smile 24/7.
The proximity to real life is hard to avoid though - moreover since the internet is socially constructed it often comes to resemble what we want to believe is true. It's like Peter Pan only more plausible, because within this simulation you too can fly. You can be the captain Jack Sparrow, himself a manifestation of the desires of audiences worldwide, creating positive reinforcement. And so people have become Gods. On the internet, you are who you choose to be, which is an important difference from the real world. Moreover, you get to define and select (largely) the world you inhabit. The point is that on the net, what is real and what is not is not easy to distinguish because we are blinded by our own biases.
The same effect occurs with other media too - to a degree. Newspapers have an incentive to not print news people would rather not have to worry about, giving rise to the modern phenomenon of tabloids. People who think TV has become sensationalist or dumbed-down often don't realise how much they themselves are to blame. But the fact is that these forms of media have always relied on the slow feedback of market research, not user-generated content. On the internet the world really does revolve around you. Internet connected machines are literally designed to do your bidding - they are your worshippers. And unlike other media, they have no obligation. While the press, for instance, must reasonably fact-check and such, internet communities can be as unreal as you want them to be. It is not hard to find people on the net who seem to be completely wrapped up in some virtuality, oftentimes without even realising it. Objectively speaking cyberbullying hurts less than interpersonal bullying, but to a victim for whom a virtual community seems sufficiently not divorced from reality, it's much worse. Of course, with Disneyland, if you don't like what you see, you can just leave. But the internet is such that it can sometimes be difficult to tell what is part of the funhouse mirror and what is not.
That's a broad description of the impacts of the internet not being real life. The rest of my case is an extension of this basic principle. And if you still don't believe me that the internet is not real life, consider that according to this website I am a pony, and that if I were a pony there would be no way I could have typed this.
Real community disassociation
The internet and the real world are substitutes. Like apples and oranges, although they share some common features they are both the same kind of thing, each one a strangely warped version of the other. The key difference between the internet and reality is how you control it. You can command the internet within the parameters allowed by programmers, and you can control those parameters by being a program yourself. Everything computationally possible is, on the internet, theoretically possible. In reality, you are bound by much tighter rules - not just physical rules either, but identities such as culture and social norms. This means that although not real, the internet is a theoretically attractive substitute. For example, with this argument I am able to reach my opponent across a great physical distance. If I were to try this in reality, shouting my argument out really loudly, it is unlikely we would be able to get anywhere even if we constructed really huge megaphones for the purpose.
Researchers have identified four elements of a community - cohesion, unity, shared history and close relationships. All of these can be true of online communities too.
Take your average young person, trying to find their place in the world. They need a coping mechanism. Now there so happens to be this parasocial virtualised funhouse-mirror community over there they can control. Doesn't that sound enticing? But since their private world is now under their control, they become addicted. They become antisocial and depersonalised. They become removed from their physically proximate communities. They become lost. Go to your average DOTA tournament to find some of these people.
The same trap exists for older people too. With the allure of the internet, elders who would previously be organising community events instead become invested in joining online communities - stayfriends, linkedin and the like. The few elders who remain behind blame the youth for not turning up to their community events, reinforcing adultism in the general population. That drives the virtual and real world still further apart, thus creating more community disassociation because youth have more incentive to escape the persecution of the older generation.
Even if the internet did create a physically proximate community there are strong limitations to its associability. The very fact that the internet enables us to become preoccupied with more physically distant people shifts our focus from local concerns towards more global ones, or concerns not based on physical boundaries at all, such as online debating.
The impact of this is the irrelevancy of reality. We now no longer communicate with our neighbors because there is nobody else to talk to - we communicate with them only if we want to, with the understanding that we can choose from billions of other internet users to talk to, not just the dozen or so on our street. Not only is this physically liberating, but it also enables more social mobility than ever before. The internet lets you be your ideal self, not your real self. Just saying, I might actually be a genius five-year-old girl from Tanzania, and you would have no idea.
Conflicts spill over to the internet, but the internet's benefits do not spill over to reality. Just having a cable run to your house does not allow you to defy gravity, but loading a space simulation Java applet does. This is Robert Putnam's "civic crisis" - we are too easily apathetic to real-world concerns, more so than ever before. As two researchers once eloquently put it, "virtual communities are spatially liberated, socially ramified, topically fused, and psychologically detached, with a limited liability. In this sense, if we understand community to include the close, emotional, holistic ties of Gemeinschaft, then the virtual community is not true community."
The nature of modern conversation
As we become gradually engrossed in this Disneyland reality, our mode of thinking changes to reflect that. We evolve and adapt to changing conditions based on the environment we choose to inhabit, so the more connected we are online to the digital world, the more we become a part of the digital world ourselves, usually without even realising it.
EDEB8 is part of a counterculture. We mostly discuss real world concerns here, but that isn't because we actually do anything, it's because we enjoy it. I recently posted a quote on the site blog from Prof. Barry Smith, bemoaning the internet: "Debates seem to be decided at the level of abstracts, repudiations signaled by the title and a hundred words". At the time that Barry Smith wrote that, he was absolutely correct. Still today we have not yet seen this counterculture translate into serious action. Even so, this is still not the norm.
First of all, the parasocial nature of the internet has changed the context of identity construction from being social to being personal. Socially this has huge ramifications because we no longer accept people judging us for being who we believe we are. This is both a blessing and a curse, but it is certainly disruptive. The gradual acceptance of gay marriage is a prime, though benign, example. On the other hand, this same powerful mechanism also operates on the construction of identities, to encourage people to become avatars of symbols through the internet, and use that to unleash chaos on the real world. The image of the martyr that has been propagated by many fundamentalist Islamist clerics online is a good example.
In 2005, "farouk1986" posted to gawaher.com (a otherwise friendly Islamic forum) that "I feel depressed and lonely. I do not know what to do. And then I think this loneliness leads me to other problems". He was a lost young soul, looking to construct his identity but finding only an empty shell inside. A short time later, the guy became the notorious Northwest Airlines Flight 253 bomber, near Christmas, 2009. Now of course it might be argued that previously, this guy might have meandered down to the mosque and influenced by some radical cleric in person. But this is where the parasociality comes into play - this guy, from England/Nigeria, was recruited by Al Qaeda of Arabia based on the orders of a cleric in Yemen. It's a lot easier for me to type to you "go kill some infidels" than it is for me to stand up on a minaret and shout that out to the local populace. And because the farouk1986 created his identity personally, he did not have the rest of society to guide him also. A society structured around suicide bombing would probably both explode and die rather quickly, but on the internet a personal society could absolutely do that.
Secondly, the contents of discussions is more abstract and less meaningful. This is because rapid access to information creates demand for rapid digestion of information. The modern idea of restricting character counts is a good example of this phenomenon in action, with Twitter being an excellent case study. If Descartes had merely tweeted "I think therefore I am #philosophy", the full impact of his statement would not be realised because it ignores the important context surrounding it. The accessibility of such snippits makes it relatively desirable to digest such information in the virtual space. That's great for learning facts, but bad for learning to solve problems on ones own. It's the latter that's destined to be important for the future of humanity.
Thirdly, brains are not designed to handle very high volumes of information. Autism is a disorder where people get high volumes of information from the real world, causing all kinds of consequences such as impaired communication skills, reduced social interaction and stereotyped behavioral patterns. The internet forces people to become autistic because it bombards us with an awful lot of information, overloading the natural filters that we have. In "The Dumbest Generation", writer Mark Bauerlein explains that this is a consequence of reading screens instead of reading books, which is what's happening increasingly with our species. This is why what Bauerlein calls "techno-evangelism" is dead wrong - the internet CANNOT create exceptional innovation or creativity, because while being addictive it is also locking up our creativity.
These problems are particularly true of young people (currently the most active users of internet technology) as their brains are not yet developed fully. New media has been termed social media, but it is in fact anti-social. When we begin to lose higher-level communication, we lose our ability to solve problems.
The real world needs us
The last ten years has proven that we live in a time of great change. We have witnessed revolutions and war, economic boom and bust, social unrest and change, and more. All of these changes were created not primarily by computers, but by people. Therefore it is not the case that computers need to become more connected to reality, or better simulations of it. It is that we need to become less disconnected from reality. Because I can bet that if there is one thing the next ten years will teach us, it is that we still have a long way to go.
The world faces numerous, serious challenges - socially, politically, religiously, economically, environmentally, and we need to rise to the occasion. Even if it were true that such problems did not exist under the status quo, however, tomorrow is a new day, and will inevitably bring new threats, just as threats have arisen in the past.
This is not to say that the digital world does not have problems of its own that need solving, but when real-world concerns are increasingly trumped by digital ones, it's the real world that suffers.
The resolution is affirmed.
Return To Top | Posted:
2013-12-24 21:03:51
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Blackflag (CON)Round Forfeited
Return To Top | Posted:
2013-12-29 21:04:01
| Speak Round