[hitchhiker999]

Great! We're all old here it seems (I'm 42), a few of us joined back in the 90s...

It started as a great human experiment, such fun. It became co-opted by commercial enterprise. The two largest gateways into the experience are now Google and Facebook. Really, what did we expect would happen? Probably best to take it back now.

[krapp]

> Probably best to take it back now.

Why? The internet isn't for us, it shouldn't be a quirky clique only for the technorati, it should to be for everyone.

"Normal" using the internet for mainstream, banal and commercial content that doesn't appeal to us is more or less the culmination of the dream. The world has been liberated (at least in part) and connected.

Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for humanity as a whole as we mourn the loss of our own cultural relevance in the greater scheme.

[drb91]

> Let's please at least take a moment to appreciate what's been gained for humanity as a whole

The ability to interact faster? It’s a big wash: positive and negative.

It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

[krapp]

It's a lot more than the ability to interact faster.

Prior to the internet, the paradigms for mass communication were the telephone and paper mail. Either slow, or expensive, over long distances. Mass media was entirely centralized and corporate owned, and information meant finding physical references at a library.

Now, mass communication is nearly instantaneous and multi-paradigm (text, images, video, documents, whatever) and pretty much free, or at least no longer priced as a function of distance. My Australian in-laws Skype almost daily with my family, something which would have been, at least, prohibitively expensive before the internet, and wouldn't have involved video at all.

Mass media is dying out to web content. Instead of subscriptions to newspapers and magazines, and whatever is on television, we have literally more content than is possible to read, watch and listen to, on every conceivable topic, professional, amateur and archival. And thanks to the internet, media is no longer tied to physicality. You can watch movies without a DVD, play games without a cartridge, etc.

I would argue that the internet has been more revolutionary in terms of the way the common person accesses and harnesses information than the printing press. The mere fact that an ordinary person can publish to the web, as opposed to, say, printing out flyers or a zine or being lucky enough to write for a mass-print publication, has been transformative.

I don't really see that as a "wash." There have been some negative effects, and damage to privacy and personal liberty (as one could argue there are with any form of mass communication) but I struggle to think how the negatives would equal, much less exceed, the positives.

[jcoffland]

> It’s hard to see the internet as objectively good for humanity.

You could say the same about the automobile.

[drb91]

Definitely agree.