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The Internet Social Networks

Thank God for the Internet (inputmag.com) 164

Everything is so dark, but the internet -- for all its bad and broken parts -- is helping to keep us together in a way that has never happened before, writes Joshua Topolsky in an essay on Input Mag. Two excerpts from the essay: What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained? For all of its failings and flops, all of its breeches and blunders, the internet has become the digital town square that we always believed it could and should be. At a time when politicians and many corporations have exhibited the worst instincts, we're seeing some of the best of what humanity has to offer -- and we're seeing it because the internet exists.

I was 12 the first time I logged onto whatever was called the internet then. There were no websites to speak of, not really. No ecommerce, no banner ads, no data tracking, no spyware. iPhones hadn't been invented yet; we called apps "programs"; and I had an EGA monitor on my PC (a whole 16 colors of range). But the first time I telnetted into a chatroom about raves, made new friends in Australia, or downloaded files to load into a music tracker, I felt the same elation that I feel now. This force, propelled by people, connected by copper and light, letting us make new connections. Connections we need now more than ever. We're here together, for how long we don't know. But we're not alone. Not anymore.

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Thank God for the Internet

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  • Thank ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by GS1 ( 5266363 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:12PM (#59901588)
    God ?
    • by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:17PM (#59901612)

      Right?

      Should be Al Gore.

      • Re:Thank ... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:23PM (#59901644)

        Should be Al Gore.

        Yes, and ARPA (now DARPA)

      • I read somewhere it was a DARPA project, on the budget, signed into law by RIchard Nixon ... so Nixon created the Internet.. Yea!!!!

      • by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Right? Should be Al Gore.

        But who created Al Gore? His parents. Who were created by his grandparents. And so on and so forth back to Adam and Eve, that God created. We call this the butterfly effect. So I hereby propose that from now on we address him as First Butterfly. Also, he's a bigger credit hog than Al Gore.

    • by klipclop ( 6724090 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:18PM (#59901620)
      Or network engineers. I wish we were treated like gods. Can I get a pay increase now?
      • by fahrbot-bot ( 874524 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:40PM (#59901728)

        Or network engineers. I wish we were treated like gods. Can I get a pay increase now?

        What does a God need with money -- or a Starship, for that matter?

        • I was about to post something about that same reference. Would have been neater if you had not wrote the bit about a starship to keep things obscure so only true nerds would have understood it.

          The actual quote is not "What does a God need with a starship", by the way, but "What does God need with a starship?".

          • The actual quote is not "What does a God need with a starship", by the way, but "What does God need with a starship?".

            Ya I know, but the original post said, "I wish we were treated like gods." so responding with "a god" seemed more correct than simply "god" -- sigh, grammar man ... :-)

          • That quote is the only reason to actually watch Star Trek V. The rest of it is unbelievably bad. Giving Bill Shatner the director's chair was like giving a six year old a million bucks and saying "No don't spend it all on candy..."

        • Hey, God's got bills to pay too. Can you imagine Heaven's payroll? A bit an archangel alone makes seven figures a year.

      • We don't pay God. We pay the priests, rabbis, imams, shamans, etc. So, by analogy, I think, yes, we can give your managers a raise now. :-)
    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Tablizer ( 95088 )

      Just define "God" the way Einstein did: "The being, force, and/or thing which brought about the universe. The nature of this creating force is either unknown or subject to debate, pending further discoveries." (paraphrased)

      Like relatively, it's waffly yet brilliant. And won't tick off most religious traditionalists, something rare in science these days.

      (Don't know if this applies to the Internet, though, since it was built by known humans.)

      • Just define "God" the way Einstein did: "The being, force, and/or thing which brought about the universe. The nature of this creating force is either unknown or subject to debate, pending further discoveries."

        You do know we have standard names [wikipedia.org] for the forces in the Standard Model, right?

        I do realize you're speaking of the Before Time before time, but honestly, can you not think of a better term than "God". It's so loaded.

    • If MIT and the DoD are God, then I suppose so...

    • by mi ( 197448 )

      Yeah, I was just about to post same. The very existence of Him being among the first topics [wikipedia.org] discussed on the Internet, are we seriously thanking Him for the modern wonder?

    • by nospam007 ( 722110 ) * on Thursday April 02, 2020 @03:50PM (#59902302)

      "God ?"

      In Florida, churches have been declared 'essential business', which means all the Christians will be dead soon.

      • Sounds like a lin-lin* situation: they get to go to heaven, and we get rid of them.

        *For many a slashdotter, the "win" prefix is associated with loss rather than victory. Although with the exponential nature of the crisis, a lin-log situation might be more appropriate.

  • by davebarnes ( 158106 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:16PM (#59901610)

    I see both cell phone and high-speed internet being recognized as a necessity similar to electricity.

    • Electricity isn't a right, though
    • I see both cell phone and high-speed internet being recognized as a necessity similar to electricity.

      Not for rural areas. There are still 20,000,000 people in the United States who cannot get anything better than dial-up speeds, and even then, only when the weather's nice.

    • I see both cell phone and high-speed internet being recognized as a necessity similar to electricity.

      When I was a kid, if we wanted electricity we had to fly a kite during a storm with a key attached. And save it in a jar. Against the wind. BOTH WAYS!

    • by hey! ( 33014 )

      If society demands you do things that are contingent upon having Internet access, then it's not unreasonable to expect society to make Internet access available.

      Sure, Internet access isn't a natural right -- something that any conceivable society should be bound to honor.

  • This is BS (Score:5, Insightful)

    by NateFromMich ( 6359610 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:17PM (#59901616)
    We'd be fine without out. Some people would have withdrawals, but having grown up without the internet and survived entire summers without my friends around (I lived in the country) before I was old enough to drive, I know it can be done.
    • Re:This is BS (Score:4, Insightful)

      by nightflameauto ( 6607976 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:25PM (#59901656)
      I'm with you. I spent my summers as a kid on a farm. You'd sometimes go weeks without seeing or talking to anybody but the immediate family. You escaped for a moment or two here or there with a book and you'd be fine.

      The internet can be a marvelous tool, don't get me wrong. And yeah, it's nice to be able to keep in touch with the people you usually interact with every day at the office. But there are also down-sides. Tracking. Being forced to work from home which means you're never really off the clock if you're salary. Having your habits stored and sold to anyone that wants to know. Cameras watching your every move, mics recording everything you say.

      I get that a certain generation, that grew up with it, are loving that the whole world has to embrace it now and they finally get to espouse to everyone how wonderful and glowing and warm and kumbaya it all is, but it's still just a tool. A useful tool at the moment, but still just that. Feeling elation over the proper use of a tool seems a bit. . . I dunno, over the top. About the only tool I've ever used that made me feel elation was a guitar, but that's not exactly the same thing.
    • Re:This is BS (Score:4, Interesting)

      by demonlapin ( 527802 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:30PM (#59901672) Homepage Journal
      Out in the country, there's plenty to do that doesn't involve other people. In an urban or suburban environment with the parks closed, not so much. You just sit inside.
      • As Wonka says...

        The most important thing we've learned,
        So far as children are concerned,
        Is never, NEVER, NEVER let
        Them near your television set
        Or better still, just don't install
        The idiotic thing at all.

        It rots the senses in the head!
        It kills Imagination dead!
        It clogs and clutters up the mind
        It makes a child so dull and blind
        He can no Longer understand
        A fairytale and a fairyland

        His brain becomes as soft as cheese
        His thinking powers rust and freeze
        He cannot think he only sees!
    • by spudnic ( 32107 )

      Not if your job depended on you being able to be connected to continue to do your work. I believe that's the most important point to this story.

      Of course, most of us that this is the case for would have very different jobs had it not been for the internet, so there's that also.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      Lol, sure, as if the world economy isn't entirely dependent on the Internet right now. Without Internet you wouldn't have a lot of medicine you take for granted right now, everyone would suddenly get sick and die without knowing the causes which is what happened with the Spanish Flu and Asian Flu.

    • We'd be fine without out.

      Perhaps, but a lot of us would now be on unemployment if the Internet weren't available.

    • Even in the country, you have plenty of socialization on regular cadence. All the things like school, church, farmers market, and even just chawing over fence repair with neighbor are off the table right now. Country folks may have a smaller social circle day-to-day, but cut us off from those infrequent contacts? It's just as traumatic. The rate of suicide in the country is higher than in cities. The stats change, but it's always been pretty bad. Driven largely by loneliness because the majority of humans d
    • We'd be fine without out.

      How many more would be without jobs without internet?

      Or dead because they could not realistically self-isolate and had to go physically to work.

    • I know you can live without it .. but why would you want to? I grew up, in rural Oklahoma, before it existed .. I have no desire to go back to the 'Good Old Days'.

    • I dunno. I'm approaching 4 decades of having computer network access. Not at home of course, direct internet at home that isn't about dialing into a server is new and different. We had the Hayes Smartmodem which put dialup into the affordable range for consumers; so we've had the potential for tons of people to work from home for that long (whether or not it would overload the phone system is another matter). We wrote a compiler for classwork in 1985 on a 300 baud modem with an ADM-3A; yes it was slow c

    • Says the guy posting on Slashdot.

      Nietzsche said God was dead. Can't speak to that, myself, but I know for certain that irony is dead. Maybe that's the same thing...

    • by trawg ( 308495 )

      We'd be fine without out. Some people would have withdrawals, but having grown up without the internet and survived entire summers without my friends around (I lived in the country) before I was old enough to drive, I know it can be done.

      Without the Internet, I would be unemployed right now, along with my partner, my brother, almost all of my friends who are technology workers, and almost all my other friends who are other white collar professional types.

      I take your point about surviving without the Internet, but its existence is helping to keep at least some of the economy ticking along as smoothly as possible.

    • Plenty of individuals as well as large companies depend on internet for existence today. You think Google would exist with no internet, Facebook, Amazon,....?
      Internet is infrastructure, like electricity, society depends on it. Plenty of people survived their entire lives without electricity in the past, but if you were to cut US from the grid for a year, you'd see chaos like never before.

  • Porn (Score:5, Insightful)

    by jfdavis668 ( 1414919 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:20PM (#59901628)
    You forgot about downloading porn.
  • To patchwrite the late great Frank Zappa, "Amateur Radio Service isn't dead, it just smells funny."

  • Ask me in 9 months (Score:5, Interesting)

    by The Grim Reefer ( 1162755 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:26PM (#59901658)

    What the hell would we do right now without the internet?

    What's going to be interesting is to see what the birth rate is going to look like come December and into next year.

    • This graph [medium.com] from "The Limits to Growth" (from 1972) seems to be a very good prediction. Birth rates sky-rocket, but population drops nevertheless.

      • That opinion piece is bullshit.
      • Birth rates sky-rocket, but population drops nevertheless.

        Not from Coronavirus. This is a flu, it's not smallpox. We need to flatten the curve, but it's not the end of the world.

  • by bb_matt ( 5705262 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:32PM (#59901682)

    I count myself lucky to be employed in these dark times.

    I am a coder - I wasn't always, once I put pen and ink onto plastic film and paper, my first career as a draughtsman (yes, I'm am old).

    I count every day as a blessing that I chose the path I did, from early days as a teen, spending hours in front of the TV - not consuming, but creating, on my less than trusty ZX Spectrum. Those early days would turn out to be my saving grace in these times.

    The internet - hah - I recall visiting a buddy who wasn't even into computers as far as I knew, back in 1993, he had a 9600 modem and was demonstrating to me some plain text websites on Mosaic. I recall being unimpressed at the time - I was 25, I had better things to do with my time. (more fool me)

    Two years later, still a draughtsman, but now using CAD, my company at the time had 'fast' internet access - a 128k dedicated line shared between 100+ employees, most of whom never used it.
    I downloaded Doom & started making levels, followed by Quake - oh my god, Quake Shareware - what a time to be alive!. I upgraded my work computer from Windows 3.1.1 to Windows 95 over the company network, without anyone realising. To this day, I have no idea why I wasn't fired for doing this - probably because the IT support were so impressed I managed to achieve it on a 386.
    My days on the ZX Spectrum suddenly became rather useful - I was a natural at this.

    At home, back in '95, I still had no computer, so I would haul my work computer back home with me under the guise of getting work done. I had no telephone, so I would literally hack into the wires running through the block of flats I lived in to find a 'live' connection to connect my modem to. At one point, I climbed up a telephone pole and crocodile clipped connections to get a connection, with a buddy in the house manning the modem - "Yep, we got a dial tone!"
    I recall occasionally, hearing voices through the modem "What are you doing on my line?" "What is going on?" - quick, disconnect, find another.

    It was only later that I realised there was a world of wonder for this kind of activity - we just wanted to get online.

    God only knows what bills we raked up for unsuspecting households - we didn't care - we were on the internet.
    IRC all the way baby - who are all these people online? This is like ham radio with text!

    Fast forward to my career as a web dev, to real audio, to flash, to the early days of video online - so exciting.
    Then a long period of stagnation, nothing new happening - queue super fast broadband - now anything was possible, everything was possible.

    It always was, of course, but now it was faster, now we could get more types of data shunted across the world - and then - well, then it was just normal.

    Taken fore granted, kinda boring, like switching on a light or running a tap.

    And here we are, in the darkness, with this beacon of connectivity making things bearable.

    I love you, internet, you are my little earner, my livelihood, my inspiration and my consumption.

    Rock on!

    • To be honest I switched over to WinNT asap and avoided Win95 like a plague since it had issues with large hard drives and could not support an Oracle instance

      Beyond that I also moved from draftsman (in the US obviously) to CAD, then to GIS and finally Oracle products, which I support to this day.

      My most hackerly moment was when the CAD manager refused to let me get access to his system (this was 1988 and microstation was a hot commodity), so I broke into his office (credit carded the door), got the key to t

  • by cmdr_klarg ( 629569 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:33PM (#59901684)

    Really, it was no problem.

    Yes, I am God. I know this because when I talk to Him, I find that I'm talking to myself.

    (shamelessly stolen from someone else)

  • "What the hell would we do right now without the internet? How would so many of us work, stay connected, stay informed, stay entertained?"

    We would do exactly what we did before the Internet.

    Work from Home? What's the problem? Used to do that long before this new-fangled Internet thing.
    Stay Connected? What's the problem? Used to do that long before this new-fangled Internet thing.
    Stay Informed? What's the problem? Used to do that long before this new-fangled Internet thing.
    Stay Entertained? What's the

  • that will resonate with a lot of rural Americans:

    "Nature knows no boredom. It is an invention of the city folks."

    If we didn't have the Internet, people would just go on longer walks, out into nature where nobody else is,
    and come back much happier than we will ever be now.

  • In 1988, I was in India and my college had email facility. This is how it worked. you create email on whatever machine you had. This gets copied to floppy disk and then we take this to the main computer which was connected to 1200 bits/sec modem. The modem is only turned on after midnight to save the telephone rate. All the data will be transmitted/received at that time and the received email will then be sent back to receivers on floppy disk.

    • In the USA we had FIDONET, which passed emails between Bulletin Board Systems (BBS), and BITNET which passed emails between university owned systems. Yours may have been one of those, too.
      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        We also had "snarf", which would let you queue a download from a BBS that exchanged messages with the one you were currently on. These would also be downloaded the next time the two make contact, and then either held for you, or added to the BBS's own files to be downloaded at your convenience as well as everyone else's.

  • by pgmrdlm ( 1642279 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:41PM (#59901742) Journal
    Physically without the internet. Also, I think that the internet has increased the stress level of many people from overload of information.

    I use the internet for almost everything. But I think I could survive without it. Back to bike rides in the parks for relaxation. Take up fishing again. Families would be tighter due to people would not always be wrapped up in their personal electronic device.

    The internet is good, it has done a lot to improve lives. But it has been at a loss for other things that were just as important.
  • Hyperbole (Score:5, Insightful)

    by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @01:59PM (#59901838)

    "Everything is so dark..."

    Oh please.

    Yes, this COVID-19 situation is serious and we're finally taking somewhat drastic short-term measures to contain it. But COME ON. Do people know nothing about history? We're claiming that "everything is so dark" because we're stuck in our homes for a few weeks to control a virus? We have enough food, we have shelter, people aren't dropping bombs on us or sending us to gas chambers or slaughtering us because we're educated (or, if they are, it is unrelated to the coronavirus situation). We're not going to lose 1/3 of our population due to the disease, like happened in Europe during the plague.

    Get some perspective.

  • give me a break (Score:4, Insightful)

    by BringsApples ( 3418089 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:00PM (#59901842)

    We'd be watching TV, or playing board games and cards. We'd be doing the things that we did before the internet. Why suppose that without the internet, we'd be lost on what to do? See, it's the vast amount of attention given to the internet that's made us question the world without it.

    • We'd be watching TV, or playing board games and cards. We'd be doing the things that we did before the internet. Why suppose that without the internet, we'd be lost on what to do? See, it's the vast amount of attention given to the internet that's made us question the world without it.

      But what I'm doing now, during this stay-at-home crisis, is working, pretty much the same as if there were no crisis. That wouldn't really be possible without the Internet.

  • I was 12 the first time I logged onto whatever was called the internet then. There were no websites to speak of, not really.

    This whippersnapper is what counts as a wisened sage nowadays?

    In my day, we didn't have no stinking baby Internet. We didn't even have dial up BBSes, except for some universities, which were long distance and $200 a minute phone bill after inflation, and only your school had one teletype terminal anyway that they let you use for a half an hour every year.

    You had to go run the fields by factories or the woods and once every four years you found a Playboy or maybe a Hustler IF YOU WERE LUCKY! Oh Sears catal

    • "You had to go run the fields by factories or the woods and once every four years you found a Playboy or maybe a Hustler IF YOU WERE LUCKY!"

      Hmmm. I always thought that was what Barbershops were for. You got to read all the good magazines and paid for it by letting the shopkeeper cut your hair.

      • lol, when I was 12, the grade schools started having paper drives

        There was a new apartment complex next to my parents house and my friends and I would take grocery carts there and fill them with the daily news papers.

        We won the paper drive in an overwhelming manner, and also learned about all the other nasty stuff that people throw away

        Never underestimate the value of dumpster diving, and conversely, never throw anything away that can be used against you without shredding/burning etc...

  • God?? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JustAnotherOldGuy ( 4145623 ) on Thursday April 02, 2020 @02:14PM (#59901912) Journal

    How about thanking Vint Cerf, Claude Shannon, Vannevar Bush, Larry Roberts, Elizabeth Feinler, and yes, even Al Gore. Those people actually did stuff.

    But "god"? God had nothing to do with it and the very mention of that kind of horsecrap demeans the work of actual pioneers of the internet.

  • Along with newspapers, magazines, and the landline telephone. All of these things came into our homes and brought our neighbors and world closer to us. Arguably things were better then because these sources were curated and edited. The filtering wasn't perfect, but we weren't enduring an unfiltered stream of other's nuttiness, vitriol, and panic like we are today, either.
  • Us here, during Korea, Vietnam, Gulf Wars I and II, and Afghanistan, don't know dark.

    Dark is 5 gallons of gas a week. Can you live on that?

    Dark is living in the Tube, getting bombed at night, every night.

    Dark is having no coffee, no sugar, meatless tuesdays.

    Dark is coming, folks. Perhaps all you sunny-side-up fellas should bone up on history. We tend to forget the bad quickly, this is essential to survive.. but that's why we write down the bad bits too, because they're also essential to survive. Or rath

  • I have had "The Net" long before "The Internet". And several business partners and family members had these too.

    From 1985 to 1995 I have been using a lot of dial-up BBS. There were tens of thousands around the world.

    From 1990 to 2000 I have been using for thousands of hours FidoNet with Millions of Users, thousands of discussion groups and access to millions of files.

    I also used Usenet frequently from 1990 to 2010 but I guess that already qualifies as "The Internet" even if I connected to it using UUCP inst

  • It seems like are in the middle of Asimov's Last Question
    • by twosat ( 1414337 )

      Or Fredric Brown's (very) short story "Answer"

      Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.
      He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe -- nine

  • Like Beer, the Internet is the cause of and the solution to all problems.
  • "I was 12 the first time I logged onto whatever was called the internet then"

    I am 56 and have *never* to this day logged onto "the internet" (or the Internet either, for that matter).

If all the world's economists were laid end to end, we wouldn't reach a conclusion. -- William Baumol

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