internet and culture are like cream in coffee; the more you stir it up, the more of each you lose. My personal experience is that i left behind a large, extended family in 1970 at barely 18 and moved to australia. In those early years a decent phone call to mum cost about a hundred dollars; hate to think what that would be now. Lost touch with most of the family over the years and it was only internet that brought us back together. That and faster aeroplanes. 8)

Internet has definitely broadened access to information, but the signal to noise ratio is terrible. There is so much misreporting, misinformation, and outright deception that it's harmful. I lecture at a university and so many of our undergrads have no idea how to find reliable information online when they first arrive, they are used to having teachers tell them good sources but what they really need is to learn how to find them themselves.

I wouldn't say that the internet has truly democratised access to knowledge either, it's alright for people in developed countries with the infrastructure to make internet access affordable, but what about people in developing nations? What about the death of net neutrality in the US? These are major obstacles.

It has made the world vastly smaller. We can video chat with anybody anywhere on the planet at any time. The flow of information-or misinformation-is at your fingertips at anytime. You can meet and marry anybody from any part of the world. You can get anything and have it shipped to your house without setting foot outside. Books and newspapers are giving way to digital models. An ex got her B.A. and masters in library science on line.The library she ran she turned into a community/senior center with books
But wherever you have good, you will have bad. I don't call it the misinformation superhighway for nothing. Nut cases will put garbage on the web and have friends put up false praise for things that are total lies to sell their product that is a total fraud. Just con artists selling snake oil to take your money. The sky is the limit and the hole is very deep. The trick is telling the two apart.
Then there's entertainment. I can listen to any radio station anywhere around the world. All I have to do is tell my voice interface (where was that 5 years ago?- nonexistent) to play such and such radio station and I'm listening to a station from Europe as clear as can be. TV and movies-anytime, anywhere. You have a good wi-fi and your off to the races.

Several good results..people can skip the control freak doorkeepers and find out natural cures for themselves instead of having to trust the Big Pharm-colluding, toxic-drug-pushing western doctors.

People can skip the similarly control freakish, evil record companies and take their original music directly to the people, through YouTube videos.

People can skip paying extortion prices for text books and get all the information they want for free, online. Same for getting university degrees, finding jobs, finding a mate, etc.

It's giving power back to the people.

I would like to say the internet has had a profound impact on our culture. Never in history has it been easier to have your voice be heard. Now wether your message is good or bad for the world is another story. I think individuals who want to learn from others will do so and those that want to entertain for entertainment sake will do so as well.

While the detailed implications are still yet to be seen, some of what we are experiencing today was anticipated. While the internet has sped up communication as well as simplified it, the ability to discern signal from noise is only just now coming into play.

At first, it was finding relevant information that was the challenge. Search engines like Google helped us to organize the internet into useful and relevant information per our interests. Facebook and other social media helped us to connect socially and to find like-minded people.

The new challenge is to discern facts from purposeful disinformation. This is especially difficult because we as human beings often have had trouble discerning facts/lies before having access to such a seemingly infinite pool of information. Our ability to discern legitimate patterns from false positives is already dubious (we have to have a site for the non-religious after all). We also want to be able to question the assumptions of the group so as to prevent blind conformity or group think. This is a tough balance to achieve.

In short, I think the internet is like any other technology: it is a force multiplier. It is the big lever for our curiosity... the big hammer for our social brutality... it's a tool that allows us to amplify who we are and currently it does so regardless of how useful or worthwhile the sentiment we express. The next step is to place values on what we deem worth amplification.

Are you looking to write a thesis for your doctorate? You've picked a subject with no shortage of opinions!

I think of the internet as a maze of information - a beautiful highway that most people take for granted and too few people know how to use to get where they really need to go, or do what they really need to do.
On one hand there are researchers on one side of the world communicating with scientists on the other side to find cures for diseases we've never heard of - or so we've been led to think. On the other, there are young people insulting and harassing others until they kill themselves in frustration and all of their parents say "but my child has always been a really sweet kid and could never have done anything like that" even though the ugliness is there in black and white, or pink and purple with polka dots and emojis.

There are Youtube videos of people who could be your neighbors, or who look like people you've seen in your local grocery store, and suddenly you see them spouting profanities at someone speaking another language on the phone, just because they are speaking another language. The man tells the woman on the phone to learn to speak English or go back to her own country where she belongs. The woman looks up and says to him in perfect English,"I do speak English, this is my country, I was speaking Navajo to my Grandmother!" He threw his arms up and walked away. There are millions of others, each more ridiculous than the last. The sad thing is that so many hours are spent trolling for nonsense.

So little time spent on learning things like there is a 16-year-old student that brought her science teacher a potential discovery for research into treating a certain type of cancer, and that she did this all on her own.
Photographs of outer space, and inner space, and beneath the ocean can be seen with the click of a mouse.

But I've been looking for a reasonably priced 3BR apartment for 2 months now, and no luck! Such is the internet!

Are you familiar with the term "population bottleneck"? We're already entering one. It's not just the Internet and social media, but much of the sum of technology has created a world so stressful to so many people that many find it unsurvivable. It will get worse. Likely much worse. By the time we get past it - if we get past it - much of the inability to tolerate the stresses of technology will have been eliminated from the population

That's a big subject !!

I just spent 2 weeks almost entirely without "the internet"; felt like I was on a desert island. The only connection I could make was at a pizza place up the road.

We get so much information, entertainment, and personal links/ties through this medium that to be without it is almost debilitating for someone without a social network beyond the ether.

More than anything, it is very frustrating trying to get anything done in a "new" environment. The reason I had no service was that I moved on 6/15 to my new digs and couldn't get any WiFi service until yesterday, 7/3 (due in part to my own stubbornness).

As far as what and how the i-net impacts us socially and informationally, I'm very ambivalent on that point. We can allow it to isolate us, or we can reach out through it; we can get good, or bad, information through, as much or as little as we desire. It's a tool, but a very double-edged, sword-like tool. It can bed used positively, or maliciously; it can connect people, or tear them apart.

We all witnessed what happened a few short years back with the Arab Spring phenomenon. That pretty clearly demonstrated how powerful the internet can be; along with ancillary communications systems/media. Probably the purest, most beautiful uses for this medium, at least that I have witnessed are the educational (academic) potential, and the worldwide synchronicity of musicianship as found in the Youtube videos of players globally rhapsodizing harmoniously in real time.

I think more than anything else, the Internet is a powerful tool -- and like any tool, it's all about how it's used. That being said, it's also a tool that keeps evolving, so it remains to be seen how it ultimately changes and/or impacts society -- which means remaining aware and alert.

Nearly everyone can up with truly simple but great answers ....so now I have to hate them all.....

That’s to heavy and intelligent a question.... I think I hate you ( with all due respect )

[theatlantic.com]

Interesting article in light of this conversation.

It's changing our society dramatically, and sometimes in ways we could not have anticipated but can only begin to understand with hindsight after the fact.

In some ways it resembles a kind of dawning superintelligence for the planet, an awakening of Gaia in a sense; although a superintelligence with a fair share of dark corners and psychoses underneath it all; very human in a way.

There are two other massive changes to our society which I see happening; one is ever-increasing longevity and medical care, and the other I see in the horizon is the development of full AI and artificial sentience. In the next 10 to 20 years or so I expect that to change our world totally, a bit like the Internet revolution and the smartphone revolution but x10 or x100 on those.

And I very much agree with the poster who mentioned Gutenberg and movable type; very similar technology revolution, but one difference is because it's always exponential (maybe doubly exponential even) the timescales for change are much smaller now, and perhaps for the first time ever are wrenching our society for good or ill in new directions over an interval much shorter than a generation.

So we are now being forced to learn and adapt in wholly new way during our lifetimes.

The very fact that this group is having this discussion on line is a positive impact on culture, in my opinion.

Can say at this point I am grateful for it because it has made it possible to meet many people that think like I do via Agnostics.com. The information age has made more subjects aware it also has polluted information making it misinformation with intent to deceive. We are fortunate here most of our information is not censored and we can get info from many sources to make an informed decision on what is fact or fiction. Not every country has that freedom. The information age has made us more clinical in our romantic decisions and in some respects made the dating aspect more cynical.

I like what Nick Land had to say:

"At the moment I’m completely captivated by the strength of an analogy between the Gutenberg era and the internet era, this rhythmic force coming out of the connection between them. Radical reality destruction went on with the emergence of printing press. In Europe this self-propelling process began, and the consensus system of reality description, the attribution of authorities, criteria for any kind of philosophical or ontological statements, were all thrown into chaos. Massive processes of disorder followed that were eventually kind of settled in this new framework, which had to acknowledge a greater degree of pluralism than had previously existed. I think we’re in the same kind of early stage of a process of absolute shattering ontological chaos that has come from the fact that the epistemological authorities have been blasted apart by the internet. Whether it’s the university system, the media, financial authorities, the publishing industry, all the basic gatekeepers and crediting agencies and systems that have maintained the epistemological hierarchies of the modern world are just coming to pieces at a speed that no one had imagined was possible. The near-term, near-future consequences are bound to be messy and unpredictable and perhaps inevitably horrible in various ways. It is a threshold phenomenon. The notion that there is a return to the previous regime of ontological stabilization seems utterly deluded. There’s an escape that’s strictly analogous to the way in which modernity escaped the ancien régime."

I think its having too much negative impact on how people socialize, Society is already at the point of the least amount of communication with people they don't or hardly know. And the creation of a these different types of Dating sites are not a good thing, so many exist, that its difficult to know which ones actually a re legit

Much too early to say. Any predictions from say 20 years ago were quickly seen to be unimaginitive.

I would like to say the internet has had a profound impact on our culture. Never in history has it been easier to have your voice be heard. Now wether your message is good or bad for the world is another story. I think individuals who want to learn from others will do so and those that want to entertain for entertainment sake will do so as well.

All this information and being able to communicate is a good thing . The affect its having on children could potentially be devastating.oh and it's making can I see your manager mom's way to brave!!!!

I would like to say the internet has had a profound impact on our culture. Never in history has it been easier to have your voice be heard. Now wether your message is good or bad for the world is another story. I think individuals who want to learn from others will do so and those that want to entertain for entertainment sake will do so as well.