Other than, obviously, it keeps me employed. It does seem like a bit of an odd question when you realize that in the last generation, we have all gone from sitting at the PC once a day to check emails to a near-constant addiction to our phones. The internet, it would seem, is not only good for almost everything, it’s practically indispensable. Living more than a few days without the internet seems practically impossible, or at least impossibly impractical.
In fact, one of my friends who had to go out of the house to allow for some renovations was telling me, their biggest worry was being disconnected while they were away from home. They didn’t say anything about food, heat, or even hot water. They were worried about the internet
Yet, take away the political diatribes from friends, the funny cartoons and the influencers, and what do you have?
Let’s step back for a second
The internet itself is a distributed network. This is its entire reason for existing. It’s there to preserve knowledge and communication in case of an infrastructure failure. Think about it this way. It’s 1969 and people are worried about nuclear weapons. The internet, among other things, keeps everything together because you don’t have all the scientists in one place.
By the 1980s the internet was a robust way for schools, banks, and large businesses to communicate. It is still that today, of course. For almost a generation, the financial industry has relied completely on the internet. Do you still write checks or deposit cash? If you do,it goes no further than your local branch. They record the amounts, scan the checks, count the cash and transfer the balances over the internet. It’s not a check at all really, it’s just another step in the chain of electronic money transfer.
The age of the world wide web
By the 1990s regular folks started using the internet. You might remember using AOL or Earthlink in those days. You spent 20 minutes waiting to connect. Then, you spent 30 minutes exploring primitive web pages, and 10 minutes looking through the three emails you got that day. That was possible because of a construct called “The World Wide Web.” Before then, the internet was a series of computer connection. With the world wide web, it became an interconnected community.
Suddenly, the internet in the 2000s brought us together. We became aware of terms like “social network” to describe the way that we could connect with the people from our past and present. E-mail became overwhelming, and texting took over as the preferred form of instant communication.
In the 2010s… the internet overtook us. Faced with an almost constant stream of content, we became overwhelmed with fake news, obsessed with fads that came and went in a day, and sought to insulate ourselves by watching videos … on the internet. And today there seems to be a legitimate movement to limit “screen time,” to focus on the reality of life as it stands in front of you. Paying too much attention to those little slabs of glass and metal is legitimately dangerous, especially if you should be driving, walking, or working.
So what is the internet good for?
The internet itself is clearly one of the greatest single inventions of human history, right there with the wheel and fire. It is an utterly transformative force that as pervaded the way we do every single thing. It allows us to decide how we eat, when we sleep, how we work, and with whom we connect. I have said that thirty years ago the most important tool we had was the dime… because it allowed us to communicate with the people we needed. Today the most important tool is unquestionably the cell phone and the internet that it runs.
But let’s be honest…
I don’t necessarily need to stand here and defend the internet to a bunch of people who are reading my articles on the internet, I get that. But still, it is worth it once in a while to think of the immense work that goes into making sure that you can argue politics in real time with someone 5,000 miles away, post pictures of the view out your window to the whole world, or learn in 2 minutes or less how to change your own headlight. It doesn’t just happen, it takes billions of dollars of technology, millions of miles of cable, and a whole industry. And while I’m at it, I should point out that you can get a lot of the things that run the internet at Solid Signal, because they make this blog possible and I really ought to plug them now and again.
The internet is good for an awful lot of things. At the heart of it, I have to say the thing it’s best for is actually being all around us. You don’t even think about the internet, do you? You act as if the entire sum of the world’s knowledge is all in the palm of your hand. The people you care about are there, too. The internet is good for getting you what you need, easily, silently, and quickly. And that, in itself, is just plain amazing.
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