[encoderer]

I think the author of this blog has a view of "society" that is a little myopic.

The premise that the "structure of today's society" is based on facebook and the web is, I think, something several hundred million people in this country would disagree with.

The internet itself is not yet one of the few pieces of technology that is intractably ingrained in our societal DNA. On that list? I don't know. Cars. Telephones. Television. And _facebook_ certainly isn't.

[someplacecold]

On the contrary, even if you don't use the web on a consistent basis, you actually do still depend on it. When people coordinate shipping groceries, they use the internet. When people plan any aspect of any product you use, they use the internet. When newscasters and radio announcers ready their words and check their facts, they benefit greatly from the internet.

One of the greatest benefits of the internet is that information breathability has increased drastically. A generation ago, if you wanted to know why the economy was falling apart around your ears, you might look at a newspaper, but if you didn't understand, there wasn't a lot you could do. These days, you have a million web sites and powerful tools for organizing information. Ignorant people these days versus ignorant people those days are drastically different.

And the debate is not about whether Facebook is intractable social DNA. The debate is whether it is a tremendously bad thing that users can't tell whether they're on Facebook or not. They can't, and therefore their ability to access information is greatly diminished.

I don't honestly see how you could think anything different.

[endlessvoid94]

He's not arguing the web isn't important.

He's saying that for a TON of people, they don't need to use it personally, and see no reason to put in the (sometimes) massive amount of effort to learn how to use the web. Their lives go on just fine without their direct involvement.

Also, it is useless to cry "How terrible that so many people don't understand! What a failure!" -- The only failure here is the failure to make software just as intuitive as older technology. For someone who never uses the web, Google is the only option because of it's incredible simplicity. It takes a non-web savvy person quite a while to parse something like Facebook or Amazon.

I'm amazed at the narrow view that so many people (seem to) have.

[someplacecold]

He said that the internet is not something that society absolutely cannot function without. He is wrong. Society very much depends on the internet. The fact that not everyone has a Faceboook profile is inconsequential to this, and I would point out that the one does not follow the other.

Further, saying that the failure lies in the fact that we need to "make software just as intuitive as older technology", is just hilarious. Since when is "older technology" intuitive? Simple, sure, but intuitive? It's not like the natural state of an old-fashioned phone call is fraught with complexity, and that phone companies have won a major victory by wrapping them in a simple user interface. You just call, then you're done. If that's intuitive, I assure you, it's accidental. And have you ever sent a letter before? What's intuitive about addressing an envelope, or styling your letter accordingly? What's intuitive about stamping it and sending off? We've been doing it forever, but that doesn't make it natural.

What you want to say is that we should be making software a simple and familiar as older technology. But at what cost? I love my smart phone, and as far as I'm concerned, it's about as close to being as simple as it can get, while still implementing all these features I like. I'm not switching to a Jitterbug any time soon. Sure, it's intuitive, but it's also simple. My phone is intuitive and functional. That's a win for me.

The fact is, at the end of the day, progress is made by breaking the norm. I don't want to go back to the simplicity of old phones; I don't want to look everything up at a library; I don't want to do everything the "old" way. But with these leaps in progress, a lot of people have been left behind.

Yes, that's a problem. Yes, that's a failure.

[encoderer]

This is, honestly, absurd. Society depends on the internet? Sure, some people depend on the internet. And some companies. And some verticals.

But "depends" sounds to me like... without it, society will crumble or go through some dramatic metamorphosis. I find that... questionable to say the least. I don't remember much about the 1980s, I was 8, but I'm faily certain it wasn't the dark ages as it seems you're suggesting. Eliminate the internet off tomorrow, and society will carry on.

Eliminate motor vehicles? Electricity? Complete chaos.

The idea that it's some big problem because people can't differentiate between Facebook and some blog?

This is more myopic thinking. You're acting like if you're not on the internet you must either be amish or impoverished. Please.

[someplacecold]

HA! You just don't get it. ALL the processes for which the internet provides a mission-critical service are going to freeze. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank? Who's tracking stocks? How are you going to get all your important emails, or your contacts, or your off-site financial records from company x? All these processes are not trivially related to the internet; they depend on it in a way that cannot just be "fixed". Make not mistake, our financial system is completely and 100% dependent on internet, and if you take it away, there will be a complete disaster. Sure, some of it will eventually get where it needs to go, but some of it won't. And some of that information you need NOW.

I'll say it again: without the internet, these processes FREEZE. And that's just the effects that don't involve the lack of ability to communicate. Here are some more:

Google is worth $154 billion. That's one company alone. There are lots of companies, lots of small business that are purely internet companies. I'd say, what, a couple trillion dollars worth just in the valley alone? What happens when the internet disappears? They are all suddenly useless. Maybe it doesn't sound like a big deal, but there is a LOT of money tied up in those companies. Not only would investors lose basically all money (and thus, losing their ability to leverage more bets, etc., depending on how deep they were in), the companies that were banking on those companies to buy things would lose money. And many, many more companies would lose time and energy due to vastly decreased productivity related to not being able to get those products in as fast a manner as the internet allows.

Then there's the fact that there is a lot of valuable information stored on the internet. What happens when MasterCard suddenly can't access the balance of its creditees anymore? Who's going to absorb that debt? You? What happens when you need your social security check? What happens when you need money from a bank?

It's no secret that e-commerce is big business in the US. Even a lot of businesses that are relatively small do e-commerce a lot of times, so you also have to count the fact that all their investments are sunk, too. Then there's the cost of the lost business that brought them, which they may have been banking on. Then there's the fact that, again, they can't get goods as fast as they used to because the efficient means of communication are gone.

Then there are the international implications, which means you can take all of what's said up there, and cross-apply the affects to them, as well as how those effects will affect us.

Oh, and I still haven't discussed the fact that you benefit more than you even know from information accessibility. For the last 10+ years, you've been slowly teaching yourself that you don't need to memorize everything because you have the internet. What happens when you need all those facts, but now they're gone? What happens when reporters don't have access to those facts? What happens when vital government organizations don't have access to those facts? And it's not just you: our entire society is built around this accessibility of information. Without it, we are blind.

So yes, the internet is integral to our way of living, and in fact, the way of living of the world as a whole. If you cannot see that, you need to exit the tech sector immediately.

[encoderer]

Are you kidding?

You have no notion of the resiliency of our economy or our history as a civilization if you think that "pulling the plug" on the internet would be some crippling event.

Yes, business would be affected. But our civilization would collapse? I mean, you think people would just start hording guns and food because the INTERNET stopped working?

If Mastercard couldn't use the internet, you know what it would do? It would use banks of dedicated lines and dial-up modems to process cards, the same way it still does to this very day in most businesses.

I get that you live and breath this stuff, so do I. But you should seriously consider subjecting yourself to a liberal arts education. You need perspective. Our civilization has survived amazing adversity. Pandemics. World Wars. Revolutions. You think the internet would break us? Seriously?

[robryan]

Individual people don't need to be on the internet but if the internet as a whole were to disappear society would crumble. No one is saying that the 80's were a dark age but things we could previously manage without the internet have now become totally dependent on the internet and more and more things are every day.

[kevinpet]

Society can't function without ignition coils, but I'd wager that 90% of the world can't even vaguely articulate what role they serve.

There's a big difference between society depending on a handful of people understanding how something works, and society depending on most people understanding how something works. For some examples of the latter, you're operating at a serious disadvantage if you can't drive a car, address an envelope, or dial a long distance call.

[endlessvoid94]

I came here to say the same thing. I'm a 5th year at college and it astounds me how many CS/ECE/Engineering majors really don't understand that a vast majority of people don't know how anything works. It's a completely naive, misinformed, and narrow view of people in general.

Whenever I'm building software, I ask myself "Could my parents use this? Grandparents?" Most of the time, the answer is "probably not". But when it's "Yes", thats when I think I have a good implementation.

[avdempsey]

13 year old Americans (in families that can afford a computer with broadband) will have their whole social lives cataloged on Facebook or its successor. Indeed, even younger children will have their milestones shared by their eager parents, until they are old enough to take over. This is the divide: those who've had the ultimate social family tree preserved in a convenient database, and those who go on a road trip to search public records for traces of genealogy. Any effort an oldster takes today to preserve 'who they were' will pale next to a lifetime of crowdsourced social biography.

[iron_ball]

Overly optimistic. When Facebook dies -- and let us assume it will some day die -- who will import its data and carry on? Who will archive it? They save everything, today, but I doubt "long-term store of knowledge about individual humans" is one of their explicit design goals.

[donaq]

Well, Geocities used to be a behemoth only a company with mega resources like Yahoo could undertake. When it went down, a few individuals archived most of it [citation needed]. I'd imagine that if and when Facebook goes down, something along those lines might happen.