Maclean’s, a popular weekly magazine in Canada, recently had an article called “The Internet Sucks.” It even made the front cover for that week. In essence, this was a piece that loosely tied up all the negative aspects of the Internet to ultimately suggest that it was a waste of money. I sent them back a letter.
I was rather dissapointed to read the article on the Internet by Steve Maich. The article is essentially a run-down list of everything that’s wrong about the Internet, and in the end, considers it all a waste of money. I thought that the best rebuttal to this croc might be by talking about my day yesterday. To give you an idea of context, I’m an independent film director/producer/writer.
When I woke up, the first thing I did was check my emails. Thanks to the Internet, the speed of passive communication has increased tremendously. I could just picture the pessimist author of the article suggesting that I could phone these poeple instead. I could, but phoning isn’t appropriate in most of these circumstances.
After having finished that up, I ate breakfast. I watch television whilst I eat. Yesteday, I saw something in the news that grabbed my attention, but unfortunately the news report was skimp on details. Once I finished my breakfast, I decided to look up some information on these events via Google News. Online venues provide me with far more information than my local paper and television ever have. My neighbour is also a big fan of the Internet, as she can now read up the latest going ons in her home country of Romania.
I finished all that up and began to do some writing. I was writing on the OpenOffice wordprocessor, a free open-source software suite released online. In fact, nearly all the software on my computer is open-source, and legally distributed for free over the Internet. Because of the technical nature of my film script, I also have to do alot of research. Thanks to the Internet, the time consumed for fact-finding has been cut exponentially. Google can find in 3 minutes what sifting through newspapers and library books would in days and weeks. Furthermore, the sources I choose to retrieve my information from over the Internet are either the same ones as their print counterpart, or just as credible.
Being stressed out a bit, I decided to then go out for a walk. I tend to listen to music during my ballads. Yesterday, I was listening to this CD from this band in the UK. These guys are really good, but they’re still not big enough to have any representation in North America. In fact, if it wasn’t for the Internet, I would have never found out about their music in the first place. The CD itself, being unavailable in all stores here, I ordered directly from the UK online.
When my day came to a close, I picked up a book from my bed side and began to read. This was a book my acquaintances online had recommended to me. A few weeks previous, I had read bits of the electronic version that the author had released for free. I very much enjoyed what I read, and I wanted to get the paperback edition. Unfortunately, my library didn’t have it here, nor did any of the local bookstores. It was Amazon that came to the rescue. Great decision as well, as the book turned out to be fantastic.
That’s not to say that there are no negative aspects to the Internet, but to so bluntly dismiss all it’s positive ramifications for the sake of the lesser significant darker elements is simply foolish. Not to mention that the absence of the Internet would not make these things dissapear either. We would still have pedophiles and computer viruses, gambling addicts and terrorism, whether there is an Internet or not. To somehow suggest that we’re better off without it seems ignorant, at best. The author might as well have written an article on the airline industry, calling it a waste on the basis that it’s been exploited by terrorists and used by child molesters to more quickly access their victims.
A nonsensical proposition? I would think so too.
Yours truly;
-Julien McArdle