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Do you sometimes wish the Internet had never been invented?
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Ah I think I've become too dependent of the internet. When it goes out more than ten minutes I go crazy. (Reboot the modem, the server, call the hubby (if he's somewhere in the house. I won't bother him at work but then I check the clock and wish he'd come home earlier).Yet, I know how sometimes glitches happen. My son lost a whole manuscript he was writing when his HD broke many years ago. He hadn't made any copies. So yeah, I'm a little paranoid. My computer is backed-up on a home server once a day. I keep all my files (docs, pictures, books, music) on two thumb drives, two portable HDs, and another attached to the computer at all time. Since a fire could destroy all that, I keep one portable HD and one thumb drive in my purse, which goes everywhere I go. I also tend to print work in progress as I finish chapters.
Did I say I was paranoid?
Yet with all that, I wouldn't want to go back to the time we needed to go to the library to do research, or if we were lucky enough to have an encyclopedia home, to have to search manually through them and read everything on the subject just to find the tiny info needed. No, really, I much prefer to do a google search.
I also prefer email over mail AND phone. I hate phones, and physical mail is so unreliable. I can't count how many times I found neighbors mail in my mailbox (and often not so near neighbors from another street). Now it's fun to take a walk and deliver them to the right address personally but sadly, my neighbors don't seem to have the same feeling about that personal service.
So technology with its down side is far better than no technology any time!
No, I never wish the Internet had never been invented. I will be sixty three this year, so unlike many younger people, no doubt, I do not take the Internet for granted. Since tuning into the Internet in the summer of 2012, I have been able to share my poems in the Poetry group on Goodreads, on poetry sites on Facebook and on my WordPress blog, and I have been encouraged by the positive responses others have made on them. Reading and writing both being solitary occupations, I think the Internet is wonderful for anyone who writes. I like to see my own page for my book on Goodreads and on Amazon, and I am looking forward to promoting my new book, a light-hearted science fiction story, on the Internet, when it is published later this year.
No, even as old as I am I'd never want to return to the "good old days," at least, not as far as technology is concerned.
Time doesn't stand still. We have two choices - keep up or be left behind. I'm 67 years old. In my opinion, the best thing about the "good old days" is that, back then, I wasn't good and I wasn't old.
Jim wrote: "Time doesn't stand still. We have two choices - keep up or be left behind. I'm 67 years old. In my opinion, the best thing about the "good old days" is that, back then, I wasn't good and I wasn't old."
I agree with that. In a few months I'll be 70, and no one is more surprised by that than I am.
I agree with that. In a few months I'll be 70, and no one is more surprised by that than I am.
Jim wrote: "Time doesn't stand still. We have two choices - keep up or be left behind. I'm 67 years old. In my opinion, the best thing about the "good old days" is that, back then, I wasn't good and I wasn't old."Ken wrote: "No, even as old as I am I'd never want to return to the "good old days," at least, not as far as technology is concerned."
Listen to you two - neither of you are old - because if you are, then I am as well and that won't due. We have obviously kept up with technology.
I think we grew up in a time when things changed and advanced quickly and either you adapted and grew with the advances in space, science, war, medicine, etc. or you wasted time building bomb shelters and hiding your head in the sand.
I think the adventurers (like us) will always be the ones up on the latest technology. I love it. Anything that allows me to reach so many people is wonderful. I'm discussing things with "friends" in South Africa and Australia I would have never met otherwise. How can that be a bad thing?
Like anything, there are good and bad things about the Internet, which should have brought on the Information Age and instead brought on the "Social" Age. Social meaning people listen less but talk more.
This is an interesting subject Times are moving so fast that we can become detached socially, yet through online we are better connected than any generation before. But think of what this ever expanding technology has done for writers, ebooks has made it easier than ever before to get published through smaller publishers or self publishing. Of course now the medium is saturated also, the same is true for film makers... so write that novel, produce that movie and be grateful that we live in an age where it is all possible.
"They say the best thing about the internet is also the worst, anyone can use it" - From the novel Box Cutter Killer
From time to time I'll think it for a few seconds, but It's never more than a fleeting thought that's quickly dismissed.Not only do I need the internet to publish my books, and not only do I have some great friends online, but if it wasn't for the internet I wouldn't have met my hubby, so how can I hate it when it helped me find him?
Definitely no. Sure, it detracts from my writing time and whatever, but to be honest, with or without internet, I'd find ways to procrastinate and be lazy, so it's all my fault anyway. :PThere are also so many things I wouldn't have been having to do without the internet, like moving abroad (I probably wouldn't have mustered enough courage to go through paper forms, ads etc, whereas through websites, it was so much easier). So, nope, I definitely wouldn't want to go back. ^^
Yeah, kind of. But, now we are used to internet being here so it's hard to say.. I can remember when I still was little and we had had only one computer. We didn't use it that often as TVs, tablets, phones, and laptops etc. are used today altogether. I'd go outside or read. And now I'm maybe even too much on the internet. Then again, I like my life this way too. I can learn anything new, connect with other people, get inspired & interested, find something to do. And we still have the life outside internet.
no but I do empathise about the demise of letter writing - which has been slowly happening since the 1870s when at its height you could write a letter in the morning and have a runner deliver it in London that afternoon and there were 4 posts a day...People do seem dumber but really we are just noticing what we really are more.
The internet, like any tool, is neither good nor bad. How it is used is another thing entirely. On the other hand, there are good humans and bad humans. Good humans will utilize the internet to share ideas and constructive opinions, keep up with current events, and take advantage of the commercial applications, if they so choose. Bad humans will utilize it to attack others, promote their latest scheme, and carry out any other nefarious activity they wish.
No inanimate object can, by its very nature, be good or bad. It has no mind, no feelings, and no prejudices. People do. Thy choose whether to use their capabilities for good or evil.
im not a big fan of it. but it is a tool like anything else. it makes research easier however...
Nope, that's practically my life at the moment. Too much riding on Mr.Internet
Great aphorism by Jim about the "good old days". I'm heading for 73, and know perfectly well that the years of my youth were just as uncertain, risky, yes and full of promise as they are today when I contemplate old age. Remember the Cold War, and growing up under the constant threat of The Bomb? I doubt any of us would wish away the enormous advances in medical science made possible by the new technology. So, too, for the science of communications. Marshall McLuhan's "Global Village" has come to pass. And the fact that we can be sharing thoughts in real time on matters of common interest with writers and readers around the world is to me something of enormous value and comfort, as others here have already remarked.
Anthony wrote: "Great aphorism by Jim about the "good old days". I'm heading for 73, and know perfectly well that the years of my youth were just as uncertain, risky, yes and full of promise as they are today when..."Astute observation, Anthony. Our generation, that remembers when radio was the primary access to entertainment and current events and television was still in the experimental stage, can marvel at the great strides science has made over the past five decades. The younger generation that grew up having access to a personal computer does not realize what a relatively recent and fantastic development it is.
Absolutely, Jim. Or sitting at the movies (the pictures we called it in Australia), and being plunged into darkness when the film broke ... or worse, when the old film stock (was it celluloid?) simply dissolved or burst into flames a la Cinema Paradiso?
Actually, the fact that people from all over the world can share their ideas with everyone else is one of the WORST things that could have happened -- it allows America-hating savages from all over the world to denigrate our culture, undermine our way of life and recruit like-minded people from everywhere to do us great harm! So, while the Internet is indeed very useful for things like research, it is also harmful to the nation as a whole in its current form -- in order to mitigate this, it will most likely need to be partitioned by geography so that users from enemy nations cannot reach our people to carry our their subversion.
I definitely understand your frustrations. Technology is supposed to make us more productive, but as a computer engineer I see a couple of ways where it actually can be a hindrance. Distractions (video games, social media, and dare I say it... pornography), complexity (who hasn't seen the 200-page user's guide to a new device) and compatibility ("what do you mean my device version X won't work with application version Y running on operating system version Z") can all ruin a person's day.Even so, I'm still very grateful for the Internet. I can't imagine how I would've been able to write my recent Sci Fi novel if it weren't for all of the research I was able to do online.
There's been another development on this subject. On the same day I was locked out of the iCloud, I'd received a spam email from a friend's address. I opened it in ignorance, but realising it was junk I deleted the message – but not before it attached itself to other addresses in my email list (in the same way it found itself to me). I was only of only aware of it when several friends contacted me to enquire if I'd genuinely sent them the email.My computer "doctor", here to help replace my password, didn't think the spam message would cause any significant damage. Apart from warning my friends I thought no more about it. Indeed I didn't even connect the two events - the spam and the locked password - until a few days later.
I got an email from a relative saying he'd also been locked out of his system and had to renew passwords, and thought it may have had something to do with the spam message. I can't definitely say that it had, because I'm not sufficiently skilled in the technology; nor have I heard from anyone else with a password problem.
But if the two events were connected, it does point up some of the dangers the internet poses to us all. As others have mentioned, we're inviting the malicious as well as the well-intentioned into our lives, and the need for self-protection becomes ever more acute.
Of course, if the iCloud were shutting me out because an attempt had been made to hack into my system, then it showed a degree of self-defence in protecting me, for which I am truly grateful. It reinforced the importance of secure and changing passwords, independent backups, and the need to print everything important in hard copy, even as I enjoy the many advantages the World Wide Web brings us.
I did this week when the iCloud suddenly refused to recognise my password and locked me out of site. No emails! Cut off from the world! And all I could do was get the computer doctor around to make things better again. Pay a modest fee, and vow always to print everything important out in hardcopy before it evaporates into an ethereal cloud.
That, and an angry desire to go back to that world of hand-written letters, proper manuscripts, the intoxicating smell of printers ink, and typewriters that had no ‘Delete’ button … and no need for passwords and security lock-outs either.
Of course a moment's reflection was enough to realise that, for all its flaws and frustrations, the digital world is an infinitely superior one for writers, creative artists and people everywhere. There’s the ease of composition, editing and publishing ... the speed of communications in word, sound and pictures ... the instant access (usually) to the vast amount of research information available on the Net...
Of course one has to be careful with any information found on the Internet. It's important to double check dates and sources; and very often it's necessary to visit the archives for additional material. But as a first step in the research process the Net is without parallel, and very often a fact that might take hours to discover in a library can be obtained from a Google search in minutes.
I recently needed to know the name of the passenger ferry that operated between Melbourne and Tasmania in 1941. Within moments a dozen references appeared on the screen, including photographs of the vessel and several newspaper reports verifying the name.
No. For all my wishing away the Internet the other day, it would no sooner have been granted than I'd be wishing it back again. Passwords and all.