Is the internet a good thing?

This seems like an odd question to ask, especially on a blog, but I think there is some validity in asking anyway. There is a particular part of this question that I want to address.

Now just to make it clear, there is a lot about the internet that is definitely good. In particular, so much of the social media is a positive influence, it allows people to communicate and talk and discuss, in a way that the telephone used to, and the market-place did before that. For all of the criticism of social media, in essence, it is merely another way of enabling people to communicate with each other. All of the issues and problems with social media are actually the problems with communication as a whole, just taken to a different medium.

Let me explain, because this concept is important. When our society was primarily locally based, we would talk to people, discuss with them all sorts of issues. Within a village, you would have the bores, the arrogant, the well read etc. You would have the celebrities - who may be the local gentry. You would have the local vicar, who may be the only academic in the area. What is more, you would have the odd people, the village idiot, the slightly dangerous person who the children are told not to talk to.

And people grew up knowing this range of people, learned to identify them, would occasionally taunt the weird people along with the other kids. I don't condone this demonising, taunting etc, but we did learn how to interpret people, and we learned, over generations, how to interact with people. The problem with the internet is that some of the visual clues that we used to use are lost. We are interacting with people in words - or text - only, and we have evolved to use our eyes and ears to help us interpret what people are saying to us. What this means is that we have to find new ways of interacting, new ways of interpreting what people are saying. Bear in mind that the internet is incredibly young, and widespread, non-technical usage is around a decade old. It takes far longer to develop the full communication skills needed. This will come, in some way, but it will take time.

There is a whole lot of other things that are good about the internet. e-commerce, for example, has its issues (the damage to local bookshops caused by Amazon is not to be underestimated), but it also allows me, sitting at my computer, to get access to anything I need. Put the other way, it allows someone to run a business where their customer base is very scattered, and traditional business approaches would not work. There is no sense in opening shops if your product will have one or two takers per county. It is possible that a small London shop might work, but it is difficult to keep the specialism while maintaining a market.

With the internet, of course, if you have a worldwide market of several thousand, you might have a viable business model. This is good, if I need something that is available from a specialist in Australia. I can make contact, and obtain what I want.

The truth is, the internet enables our normal interactions to be achieved in a global village. It is the same interactions, but the size of our "village" is now vast, and yet we cope, because we manage our own interactions.

There is, of course, a vast amount of information on the internet,and this was the initial driver. As a researcher, I find this is a wonderful resource, as I can access a whole lot of papers and documents that I would struggle to find otherwise. When I did my first degree, I would have to visit the library, and hope that they had the references I wanted, or that I could identify them and request the specific documents or resources. Today, I can use Google to search for the areas I am interested in, and have it return a whole range of documents, papers and books.

This, however, is where I think one of the biggest problems come. Because not just me but anyone can do this sort of investigation. I have had some training and experience in "researching", which sounds very arrogant, but it means learning something about how to assess documents, how to identify whether a resource is academically credible, all of which is critical. The truth is that anyone can put anything on the net, any ideas, any arguments. Publishing material is easy, which (positively speaking) means that it is far easier to get access to short, basic material, but (negatively speaking) means that there is no review and refereeing of the material.

Without these skills, it seems that the internet can provide support and backup for any view and opinion. It means that people can think they have researched their arguments, and so be more certain that they are right. Whereas the truth is, the same applies as always - if you want to do research, you need to do it carefully and with an open mind. You need the research skills. You need the insight of professionals. The internet can, unfortunately, hide the need for these skills. That, to my mind, is the real danger of the net.