Growing Up Online

I read a very interesting book a couple years ago: God's Debris. The book was completely fascinating, and I'll link to it at the bottom of this page. It wasn't so much a book as a thought experiment. The author, Scott Adams, gives us two characters: a deliverer of packages, and the receiver of a package: an old man who knows everything. The man who knows everything sucks the other one into an extensive conversation about life, the universe, God, etc., in a modern Socratic dialogue of sorts. He questions the delivery man incessantly - probing, thought-provoking questions about probability, free will, and God's omnipotence. In the process, he explains the universe to the package delivery man. The old man reasons that the only challenge to an omnipotent God would be to see if he could destroy himself, assuming that his omnipotence would disappear along with his destruction. And according to this old man, God did exactly that, in the Big Bang, and matter and probability (which governs our universe) were formed out of the debris. He says that our purpose in life is to put God back together, or rather, on some larger level, every single cell in our bodies is ordering us to put God back together, because every single molecule in the universe is part of God, and he's willing it to happen. How is this connected to the Internet? Well, the old man explains that the Internet is how we're coming together as one again. The Internet contains most of the knowledge in the world, and as our technological capabilities grow, so do the contents of the Internet. In the words of the old man, "Society's intelligence is merging over the Internet, creating, in effect, a global mind that can do vastly more than any individual mind. Eventually everything that is known by one person will be available to all. A decision can be made by the collective mind of humanity and instantly communicated to the body of society." Now, I'm not trying to convert anyone here. I don't necessarily agree with everything the old man says, though I'm not intelligent enough to fault his logic (Scott Adams actually challenges his readers to find the flaws in the old man's arguments). But this idea that the Internet is making us collectively more knowledgeable interests me.

My parents grew up without the Internet, and for information, they turned to encyclopedias and non-fiction books. Yet I have my own computer and constant access to this worldwide knowledge database. I think that the Internet has played a huge role in shaping my mind. I have a wide range of interests, and the Internet only serves them. If I'm writing a story, and I need to do some research, the Internet is always at my disposal. It has made gaining knowledge easier for me.

But, of course, this instant gratification has made me a more impatient person. It's harder for me to read textbooks, because I always feel like I could learn more quickly online. Knowledge also isn't exactly a novelty to me anymore. My dad prizes his encyclopedia collection, which is actually kind of beautiful. He has a full set of Encyclopedia Brittanicas, bound with deep red leather and gilded with gold writing. It was his bar mitzvah present from his parents. For my bat mitzvah, my parents gave me a computer. It's much less personal, and a lot less beautiful, and in a few years, it will be obsolete. It will stop working eventually, or it will slow down and I'll switch to a new model. But my dad's books will live on, even if they are a little bit outdated.

And even though the Internet makes gaining knowledge easier, it is also redefining how we connect to other people. I think it's partially taking the genuineness out of life. It's so easy to create a facade online, to make yourself out to be another person. And video chat has made it so much easier to stay at home, instead of actually going to meet your friends. I have often imagined a bleak future, in which we become affixed to our screens, so much so that "having someone over" means transmitting an image of the rooms of your house to screens that cover the walls of theirs, and then talking through video chat and enjoying coffee made by standardized machines, or something along those lines. But that's a very negative outlook. I prefer to see the Internet as enabling communication. It's not like I, personally, have sacrificed actual relationships with my friends. We still literally enjoy each other's presence. But mediums like Facebook or AIM have made communication easier. Since mostly everyone I know has a Facebook account, it's much easier to talk over group message than it is to conference call or hang out with people who live far away. I have many friends who live in Colorado, and Facebook has kept me in contact with them.

I'm not going to deny that I'm a different person over Facebook. I'm bolder, and I say things that I wouldn't necessarily say in public. I've had several fights with friends over Facebook, just because I can go into a long rant without anyone to interrupt me.

My opinion on technology is that it has the capability to enrich our society with knowledge, but also the ability to distort who we are and make us more impatient, irritable, and disconnected from humanity. Right now, it can pretty much go either way. Technology can either pull us apart or bring us together, and how we react to it will determine which way it goes.


God's Debris:
http://nowscape.com/godsdebris.pdf