Is the world better off because of the Internet?

...and is your point better made than any of the frivolous and flippant posts made before yours? Somehow I think not because one thing you cannot do with the World Wide Web or the Internet, as many threads here have ably demonstrated, is force it to behave or react the way you want it to and there is nothing you can do about it when it doesn't. 

A point of clarification (or two): The thread title asks "Is the world better off because of the Internet?" whereas the OP asks "is our world better off because of the Worldwide Web?" and while colloquially we use these two terms interchangeably, they are not the same - the Internet is a system of interconnected computer networks while the World Wide Web is a collection of text documents and other resources accessible through the Internet using one of a number of file transfer protocols that serve the Internet. You'll note there that I wrote "a system of interconnected computer networks" and not "a system of interconnected computers" because the Internet is a network of networks and that means it is not a thing or an entity but a network of interconnected transient conduits so the computers and servers at each node are not the Internet. The Internet was never intended to end all wars, its intended purpose was (and still is) as a military tool used to win them - development of the Internet was funded by the US DoD. The WWW is just a small part of what the Internet is and that was never its primary purpose then or now, it's just the 'visible' part of it we are all familiar with. 

Presuming data propagates through a conductor at roughly the speed of light (which it doesn't but for the sake of argument let's pretend that it can go that fast) so in 1 millisecond it would travel 300km and therefore will take 1 minute 6 seconds to travel half-way around the world. To traverse 20,000km in 1 millisecond requires data to propagate at 67 times the speed of light so until we can defy physics and get data to travel at Warp 3.5 were stuck with global communication being a long way short of being instant. Not that this distracts from the gist of what you are saying but it's the science equivalent of those tetchy grammar errors like split infinitives, erroneous use of double negatives and those "your, you're and yaw" and "they're, there and their" spelling errors - i.e. meaningless to those who don't give a flying fart but annoying and irksome to those who do. Yeah, I know you could have been using it figuratively but the difference between 1 millisecond and 66 seconds is like me saying Stonehenge is a yard from my desk when it's really 37 miles away (it's not 37 miles but until I find out how accurate the doompaul's cat is at shooting lasers while riding a taco I'll not be posting my exact co-ordinates over an open comm link).

(and just to make Madan feel a little younger...)

In Internet terms I'm not just old, I'm positively ancient because unlike other silver-surfers, I was an early adopter so I have been using the Internet for more years than many Internet/WWW users have been alive and I've seen it morph from a scientific/military tool into the world-wide shopping mall we see today. For a brief period during the middle two quarters of the 1990s when we were all dialling in at 4800 baud (if we were bloody lucky) and watching Mosaic piece together low-resolution images of scantily clad young ladies (and cats riding tacos shooting lasers) one pixel at a time, it seemed like it was there just for us to play with and all the world was ours to do with as we pleased. That's not to say it was a nice place because it wasn't - it was nasty and vicious, especially in IRC and Usenet forums, where dog not only ate dog, it would track down their canine ancestors, dig their bones up and noisily gnaw on them while humming "How Much Is That Doggy In The Window" - it was like the wild west but without the guns and the dubious preoccupation with cows and horses. However, despite all that, it was ours and even though we paid for it by the minute like some sleazy motel room, it was free from corporate interference and devoid of all those snot-nosed "dot-com" exploiters who only saw the Internet as a constant stream of $$$ signs, and that felt free to us because it wasn't permanently jacked-in to our credit cards and bank accounts, and we weren't inundated by a constant stream of adverts and junk mail. 

Being able to converse with someone you've never met IRL five, ten or twenty thousand kilometres away in a matter of minutes (or more often hours) doesn't mean that communication is better, what this vast social experiment has revealed is humans are dreadful at communication, especially in the written word where we cannot use body language, facial expression and tone of voice to help us interpret what the other person is trying to say - a failing compounded when the wrong worm is typed in what they are saying.

And that's what's really sad because when we all work together in trust and openness we can achieve great things - like this Archive of Progressive Rock that a few hundred people like Micky and myself devoted thousands of hours of free time to help populate with 9,686 bands & artists, and 51,104 albums so that many thousand more folk could then add 1,310,732 reviews of those albums. And if that isn't a positive then I really don't know what the  is.

And how different is that to what you posted? At the end of the day every post here, including yours, has been an out-take from Grumpy Old Men. 

 

To skip to another hobby, imagine what genealogical research was like before the Internet. Who would want to go back to that?

 

This is just two areas of interest to me. What about scientific research? Or any area of academia?

 

It may be a tool that has been abused by the "socially outcast," but it has brought a lot more of us together that would have never had the opportunity to meet, converse, share our knowledge, and form wonderful communities.

 

If you "can't say anything positive about the Internet" than why are you connected to it at all?

What would be the point of anything then... 

EDIT: actually, if she still visits these territories every now and then, I'm not too sure about the "surprise" part... 

Sorry Dean, but this is too generalised.  When I and my parents visited America, all the previous exposure to American culture as well as the availability of online maps and other information certainly made us feel much more comfortable in what was for us a new world.  It's not like nobody traveled far to visit America before, but the internet can make it a much better experience.  To illustrate your point about insularity, one evening we were searching for a place to eat in Niagara.  We saw what looked like a restaurant and I walked up to it to check it out.  As I was walking back, a group of four-five Indian tourists were also walking along, looking for a restaurant.  They asked me what was that place and I said it seemed to be a pizza joint and they recoiled almost instantly and said (with typical Indian hand gestures ), "No, no pizza."  Well, we did find an Indian restaurant to dine for the night but the next day we headed to the same pizza joint and it was great.  So it is not the internet that makes people insular; that insularity is already there (maybe at worst internet gets us in contact with such insular attitudes more often than we would desire but again my example above was a face to face interaction).  We have the choice to get out of the internet whatever we want.  If we are loath to learn from our mistakes and hell bent on repeating them over and over, I don't think internet nor anything else can ever help us get over that.  Personally, I think it is a terrible idea to travel all the way to America and insist on only Indian cuisine.  Better don't waste your time making that trip, then.  I mean, you still have internet to look at photographs of all the tourist spots. 

 

We tried two restaurants while we were in America and both were really good. In fact, the manager of one restaurant told us the flour being unadulterated was better than in India.