The Internet Will Not Save You

I spend a lot of time and space on this blog defending the Internet as a crowd-sourced, masterful network which can hold and make available all the information we as consumers, citizens, and people would ever want to know. But if I've given the impression that the Internet is solely a revolutionary land of gumdrops and kitten videos, you'll have to forgive me. As I've said before, the Internet is merely a tool to make your life easier. Sure, it allows us to see the evolution of ideas in real-time, and its spread to autocratic dictatorships have proven information to be the most important weapon a people can have. But outside of philosophers and revolutionaries, it is merely a merger between the people who brought you Three's Company and your phone company. The Internet is not your existential savior. The Internet is not your friend. It will not provide meaning to your dull, repetitive life.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury asks us to imagine life without meaningful literature. Characters in the novel are lulled into a catatonic state of interaction when they turn on their "walls" to join their "families", a thin approximation of televisions and sitcoms. The Internet is fulfilling this role in a unique twist Bradbury could not have seen coming. Rather than letting our mental states wallow in the Brownian motion of bad fiction, the Internet has been turned inwards. Instead of analyzing the social circles of JR and Sue Ellen, we spend hours a day pouring over our own friendships and connections. Take this graph from Nielsen, those who watch the watchers:

By nearly every measurement (the exception is bandwidth usage, which Netflix dominated pre-Qwikster), social networking is the number one use of the Internet. Social networking can mean a lot of things; these studies merely track what websites users spend their time on, not what they do on those sites. So according to Nielsen, there's little difference between flirting with a classmate and planning Occupy Maine. But what does it say about the Internet, the world's largest free library, that most of its users are too busy ogling their ex's photo albums to take advantage of the historically significant liberation of information?

Arguments about the eventual downside of artificial intelligence seem to focus on computer's gaining independence outside of mankind. But even the highest forms of artificial intelligence need input from a human and output to another human to be of any real use. All computers are, essentially, telegraphs, receiving the message of one user and transmitting it for another. So it makes perfect sense that the Internet, the closest we have come to a "world brain", would be spent on the same banalities we use our phones for (and the mergers of those two worlds was only inevitable).

Facebook and, to an even greater extent, Twitter have earned quite the reputation in the Third World for allowing the easy and free spread of information. First recognized in 2009, Twitter's use as an activism tool gained a foothold during the Iranian protests against that country's most-certainly fraudulent elections. The Arab Spring of this year has also seen social networks put to use when organizing protests. Twitter was seen to have played such a large role, co-founder Biz Stone was in the running for this year's Nobel Peace prize (the real prize will come if he ever finds a way to make money off of Twitter).

That said, the only revolutions most Facebook users are igniting are are fake campaigns to end child abuse. This fairly recent phenomenon, known as "slacktivism", centers on pointless online efforts to "contribute" to social or political campaigns. No, changing your Twitter profile to a green background did not help Iranian protesters. However, I'm fairly certain most participants are aware of this. Signing an online petition (which, some people need to be told, is completely and utterly useless) is less a solid statement of activism than it is a sign of solidarity like, say, wearing a black armband to class to protest the Vietnam War.

Internet action, as I've said before, is not the same as real action, and it would appear most members of my generation know this. However, becoming too reliant on online tactics can make us forget what tactics really work. The Far Left has been trying to force economic justice as an issue for years, and while their online activities have been numerous and plentiful, the discussion wasn't changed until people began protesting in a real and noticeable manner. The Internet is great for the spread of information, but if that mindset closes when you leave the office chair, then it can all be for nothing.