The Internet as a "place"

A couple of days ago my wife and I were talking, as parents will, about how the world has changed from the time that we were in grade school, middle school and high school. The discussion started with how much time we all (my kids included) spend online now and the things we do "there". She had installed and then almost immediately uninstalled the new Facebook Chat app for her phone because she had gotten so used to using that to chat with people and when they pulled that functionality out of the main Facebook app it was...irksome.

One thing led to another and the idea of the Internet as a place kind of manifested itself. We'd had discussions about how this generation will grow up with the net and how Wikipedia has become a "trusted online source of information"...even if it isn't, but this was different.

The Internet, via all of it's chat rooms and online games and virtual world building capability has become...a place. You can have a job on the internet, you can have friends on the internet, you can shop on the internet, date on the internet...probably have cyber sex (@kellory, I know, the less said the better, m'kay? ). You can't eat on the internet and you can't actually have kids on the internet but darned near everything else that you would "do" somewhere can be done online, as though it were a place.

We refer to websites as destinations. We talk about just about everything, sometimes with people we hardly know but are considered "friends" who we "like" (a la Facebook). We instant message/chat. We form, in a very real sense, bonds of actual friendship (a la survivalmonkey). We learn. We share victories and defeats. In a sense, the Internet has become a place.

Is this a revelation everyone else had years ago and I'm just now seeing it (been too busy with work I guess )? Is this a good thing or a bad thing.

Come to think of it, I guess this has been rattling around in my head for a while because in some ways it's a big part of the story I posted the first couple of chapters to (don't derail the thread, yes I'm still working on it).

Where does it go from here? Lawnmower man?

 

The internet has basically shrunk the world and expanded it at the same time.
Consider those that are bed ridden, paralyzed, too poor, too remote or basically immobile for some reason. The internet is their way to get to paris to see the L'ouvre or play with the dolphins, or go into the seedy strip joint, or make new friends, or research something they wanted to but the local library didn't have any info.

The internet is a freaking great place.

It's also a freaking scary and dangerous place. Scams, stalkers, pretenders and predators.
With a little information .. cross reference with a few databases .. shazam, all the personal details.

It's also killed off civility. People really are assholes in this medium. the forget that there are people with feelings on the other ends of their flaming comments .. and some of them can get pissed off and hunt you down.

But, we created world where people no longer look at each other when they sit down at the dinner table. Heck the kids sitting on the couch next to one another are not talking but texting back and forth.

Yep, we've created a monument to human ingenuity and the tool of our demise.

Welcome to Hotel California.

 

Overall, the internet is good for reference...otherwise, bad.

If I need to expound upon that, then it's too late for you

 

it is definatly convient and very help full...!!! i love the thing but!!!

IT has changed the world so much it is redicilous!!!
I was in my childrens school Last year and there wasnt one black board in the whole school!
they dont teach coursive writing in schools anymore. typing or printing
and the list goes on !!! but i still love it

 

Thank you @DarkLight @VisuTrac for what you said so well. @KAS, No blackboard!? You're kiddin' me? That's nuts. Or maybe I'm just an old dinosaur.

What do I think of the Internet as a place? To answer that, I will quote one of my favorite authors, Boston T. Party (Kenneth W. Royce of Free State Wyoming - https://charlescarrollsociety.com/2012/11/13/political-migration-free-state-project-american-redoubt-free-state-wyoming and http://freestatewyoming.org) in his depressingly informative book Hologram of Liberty: The Constitution's Shocking Alliance with Big Government , p. 320, Chapter 15 "And Now, Back to Reality" (by the way, Hologram is a well-researched and scary yet great American Constitutional history book if you have the positive energy to withstand the direness/'bummer' of the revelations and insights of Royce's treatise. If I didn't have a deep religious faith, then I would have been disheartened or depressed after reading it. It is an eye opener and a 'bubble buster'. I have read all of his other excellent books and feel this one is his most serious-dire):

Royce writes:
"The NSA will complete in September 2013 its 1,000,000 square foot self-sufficient 'Utah Data Center' housing a 512-bit quantum computer developed to decrypt intercepted domestic communications through its warrantless, automated 'Stellar Wind' spying program:

'Sitting in a restaurant not far from NSA headquarters, the place where he spent nearly 40 years of his life, [NSA whistleblower William] Binney held his thumb and forefinger close together. 'We are, like that far from a turnkey totalitarian state,' he says.
Asked how many communications -- 'transactions,' in NSA's lingo -- the agency has intercepted since 9/11, Binney estimates the number at 'between 15 and 20 trillion, ... over 11 years.' - Source: The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say), The NSA Is Building the Country’s Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) | Threat Level | WIRED"​

Kenneth Royce asserts:
"As Lord Acton said, 'Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.' No collection of politicians, generals, and bureaucrats are moral enough not to become absolutely corrupted by such a data storing and tracking capability as the NSA's 'Utah Data Center' using 65 megawatts of power. Globalist stooge Zbigniew K. Brzezinski (Democrat party apparatchik Havard professor and National Security Adviser to President Jimmy Carter, member of the Council on Foreign Relations and Trilateral Commission founder) pined for this sort of police state network apparatus back in 1970:

'The technetronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities.'
Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era, 1982​

Between Two Ages: America's Role in the Technetronic Era: Zbigniew K. Brzezinski: 9780313234989: Amazon.com: Books

Kenneth Royce suggests:
"Folks, these confluences of technology and regulation are the end of the road. (Ideally, every American should immediately resort to 256-bit encryption for every e-mail. The least we can do is try to overwhelm their domestic eavesdropping center. Also, go to encrypted open-source VoIP instead of land and cell phones. I describe how in One Nation Under Surveillance: Privacy from the Watchful Eye. Piecemeal tyranny has worked because Americans forgot or ignored the following wisdom:

'It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment of our liberties. We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens, and one of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen . . . did not wait til usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in [legalistic] precedents. They saw all the consequences in the principle, and avoided the consequences by denying the principle.' -- James Madison"
​

Good days Monkeys.

 

The things I've learned from online... remember when we were kids and we'd ask mom what something was and she'd tell us to go look it up in the encyclopedia? And you would and you'd get a few paragraphs, maybe half a page of information. And now the whole world is our encyclopedia and we could spend days pulling up page after page, varying viewpoints, ideas, examples. Things I didn't know existed until I saw someone doing or building it on Youtube, and now I can do or build it too. I'm an information addict anyway so YT is like my heroin.

 

Ditch witch, try out gpodder open source downloader program (gPodder, a free podcast aggregator for Linux, Mac OS X, Windows, FreeBSD and MeeGo for getting my daily YouTube fix. It let's you subscribe to both YT vids and audio podcasts like Jack Spirko, et al and have them automatically downloaded to your PC directory to watch using VLC Media player for instance. That way I have sorted directories on my hard disk for each YouTube channel. I love gpodder and rarely use the YouTube browser or android interface anymore, which means the evil empire of Google doesn't track me so easily, especially if I use a VPN anonymizer service when I run the gpodder program. gpodder (Software) at DuckDuckGo

Recently I have really liked watching videos from the Wranglestar homesteading channel on YT in addition to my regular fix of Nutnfancy, Sootch00-Sensible Prepper, Southerprepper1, MainePrepper, PatriotNurse, Skinnymedic, GunBlastDotCom, SurvivalPodcasting (Jack Spiro), Ferfal's ModernSurvival, Hickok45, IraqVerteran8888, FateofDestiny, PaulWheaton and GrowingYourOwnGreens for Permaculture-Gardening, and the occasional Alex Jones when he has Joel Skoussen or James Wesley Rawles on as a guest. et al.


Do any of you fellow monkeys have a favorite YouTube prepper-gun-gardening channel to recommend? Ditch Witch?

@Brokor Very well said above, thank you.

 

Hrm. Pretty much everything on your list plus BexarPrepper, DrBones NurseAmy, & MrTeslonian. Josie Outlaw...Affnan Aquaponics... There are others but they're sketchy about posting new vids.

 

I refuse to do facebook and the places I consider worth reading or just visiting I can count on one hand.

 

another positive thing that i get from it besides the knowledge is that it motivates me to do thing and start project ...
And stops me from watching TV ...staring at pointless shows ... for hours

 

There's 22 seconds of my life I'll never get back and a visual that's going to haunt me in my sleep.

Awesome, thanks melbo.

 

good point