my turn:

1. Everything follows the maxim of Garbage In - Garbage Out

2. The general rule of the Internet is "there can only be one"

3. Everyone is a lot braver on the Internet than in real life.

4. Opinions are like arseholes - everyone has one.

5. The Internet makes everyone parochial and insular.

Presactly ... it's the biggest and most entertaining distraction known to man, at least since an Egyptian called Imoteph uttered the words 'Hey guys, I've got an idea - instead of wasting our time growing food and learning to write and stuff let's all go out into the desert to carve massive blocks of limestone into cubes and pile them up in sort of 200 foot tall square-based triangular shape for no logical reason' 4,700 years ago and proceeded to occupy the entire Egyptian nation for the next two thousand years building successively larger ones until someone realised they hadn't the foggiest idea what they were for or why they were doing it. Which, coincidentally, is why the Egyptians never invented soap operas, water skiing or the internet and why the millennial generation will never amount to anything worth writing about so will be forever remembered as the generation did little other than shout angrily at pieces of electronic gadgetry made in a land far far way, without knowing how, what, why or where any of that seemed so vitally important at the time. 

 

No. Instant communication around the world has not done anything substantial like ending armed conflicts, but has become a tool to draw in the socially outcast into militant groups like ISIS.

 

It is also used by many, without a purpose in life, as a time wasting toy.

 

Aside from the brief above stated negatives, I can't say anything positive about the Internet.

 

And that is serious. And sad. 

I came back to the internet (mainly for music) two years ago. For the previous year and a half I had no internet and I got by just fine. 

To this day I refuse to use my cell phone to go online.

I'm old school anyway. I clearly remember black and white TV and hard line rotary dial telephones.

True, but in that regard is it really any different than TV or video games?

I'm on the fence about the pros/cons of the internet. I do like being able to search for just about anything. Google maps, particularly the street view, has been invaluable for me.

...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.

, yeah! 

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.

 

Yeah, guess you're referring to chutney. I am of South Indian descent too though I live in Mumbai.

Yeah, that came across as a generalisation but in the context of Internet users I stand by what I typed. Yes, it can reinforce, and in a sense validate, our inherent insular nature, but if we regard that inherent insularity as being a normalised average that occurs naturally without the Internet then it becomes the base reference point for what we can then describe as being "insular". So I'm not talking about absolute insularity and parochialism, but relative insularity and parochialism. [We can of course transpose that verbatim to any http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=107600&PID=5367711#5367711" rel="nofollow - discussions over "originality" in t'other thread,  hence my contention that connotation is more important than definition or meaning, because then it becomes a delta-function where something is original when it deviates from a normalised average. But I digress.]

While I'm not completely comfortable with the tourist example, sightseers are passive observers - they may sample a taste of something different for a brief moment, but they are also happy to return to home comforts and reassuring familiarity. I think passive exposure to other cultures, philosophies, views and opinions does little in adding to the depth of our knowledge or understanding - the Internet puts the world at our fingertips in a non-intrusive way so we can be voyeuristic sightseers without having to be changed by what we see. We can learn from the Internet but more often we use it to confirm or validate what we already believe.

There is the adage that " http://nymag.com/scienceofus/2016/02/sometimes-social-media-can-change-minds.html" rel="nofollow - no one ever had their mind changed by the Internet " because we have a tendency to like opinions that validate our own and argue strongly against those that don't. I am under no delusions that I am not a prime example of that, in fact if I were a C-List celebrity I could be the poster-boy for it, yet because I agree with you more than I disagree I am more receptive to anything you say that contradicts my own view on a given topic, especially in areas where I recognise that you have a better understanding or deeper knowledge of the subject being discussed. You may not change my mind, but you can cause me to modify my thinking, whereas I'm more likely to reject the same view from someone who argues against me at every turn. This is another example of normalisation where like-minded views come together so that this creates an entrenched attitude where views become so heavily defended they start to mirror the most extreme excesses of any view that is perceived to threaten them. This leads to a 'clumping' of Internet content.

OK, pickles, yeah, that's legit spicy.   I got confused because you used the word sauce.  And yes, carrom is very much a part of Indian households.  Did you used to sit on the floor to play carrom or mount the board on a table and pull up chairs?  As you may or may not have noticed, people from South India are fond of sitting on the floor, especially with legs crossed. 

The simplest way I can think of is to quote Shakespeare when he says "Clothes make the man", which of course they don't but being Shakespeare he doesn't mean it literally (in fact in context he was being somewhat sarcastic because the punchline to that was "...which is doubly true in France" but hey-ho).

Now, it can be argued that changing our clothes changes who we are but sadly (as someone unkindly pointed out) I look like a tramp even when wearing a £1000 suit and behave the same regardless of what I am wearing. Frequently my wife has berated me for wearing my best clothes when decorating or answering the door in my dressing gown ... ("I didn't know I had a door in my dressing gown"). Truth is we select our clothes to suit who we are so what we wear defines who we are and when Shakespeare says clothes make the man he means we are judged by the clothes we wear.

Now I wasn't being quite that poetic nor was I using "make" in quite that way, but I wasn't being literal either. The Internet doesn't literally make us parochial and insular but that does not mean we cannot become parochial and insular as a result of what we read on the Internet. 

No passive medium can make (as in force) us to react in a certain way but it can make (as in cause) us react in a certain way. If we presume that the Internet contains the sum total of man's knowledge then what we draw from it can be used to "make" us anything we want to be, yet it doesn't. The point (in context) I was making was the Internet has the potential of bringing us together as a global nation yet what we (deliberately) take from it has the opposite effect. 

OK, so our views aren't necessarily very different, except that yours is far more pessimistic.  India has had communal riots since long before computers, let alone internet.  So I don't think the insularity we see is SOLELY the effect of the internet or that that is the only thing that we all get out of the internet.  Of course, if enough of us start believing that that is all the internet is good for, maybe we will still land up in that destination.   By the way, we (my family) don't/didn't necessarily absorb Western/American culture passively.  The books, the movies had already familiarised us to a large extent with what to expect in America but we could use the internet to find out not only what places to visit in NYC but which train would take us there.  I especially could keep pace with the variety of accents we encountered while there (like this 20 something white male in a subway station who spoke very fast; I realise only upon reflection that it would have been difficult for Indians not comfortable in English to understand him).  I think all of those things would have been much more difficult without the internet, but hey what do I know.  

Ok... but you missed one. Raff will tell you 

Yes, just because you can google it doesn't mean you shouldn't try to learn it.  But I remember a survey conducted about 15 years ago where many Indians could not recall the name of the President.  This would not be unusual (since the Indian President is merely a ceremonial head of state) but in the case, the President was high profile, having formerly been involved with India's atomic programme and frequently made public appearances.  And yet, people drew a blank.  So it is not new for a lot of people to be clueless about things which we may believe are important to know.  The fact is that they are not important to know 99% of the time.  It is during that 1% of the time when you really need to remember and for whatever reason cannot access the net that having reasonable awareness helps.  Again, the latter is more of a third world problem.  I suppose it must be very rare to lose internet connectivity anywhere anytime in a country like Canada. It is like how our grocers can remember how much veggies they sold to who (and Indian customers can come up with myriad combinations of a quarter to more than two kilos of a given vegetable and buy half a dozen or more varieties of vegetables in one outing) and calculate the price accurately...without a calculator.  You don't necessarily NEED that ability if you are equipped, but the ability to do so keeps your mental reflexes fast and that is what we are losing out in general with increasing technological aid.

Indian President isn't that Bigfoot? 

Well, Italian ladies are just great, I'll grant you that.