What The Net is Doing to You

Bart writes "The BBC reports One of the world's first research centres dedicated to studying the social, political and economic effects of the net has opened in Oxford" I've offered to trade CowboyNeal to them as a research subject for a case of beer. I think studying the effects of the internet on him will save lives. See? Someone is thinking of the children.

Comments

Social Engineering

[gerf]

Is what this article sounds like. As if they want to be able to control the entire world's perception of the internet, and how they use it. This won't work of course, as business, personal beliefs, economics, and social concerns are the main driving factors in the electronic world. not some lame researcher in a cube telling everyone in his livejournal that they should think about everything in a different way

Eli Noam

[Anonymous Coward]

But he warned against simply accepting that the net was a force for good all by itself and needed no guidance by policy makers to shape its effects.

This is why I hate these social-engineering dweebs. It can never be enough that something is just there and people use it. They think that the common man is too stupid to "understand the ramifications" and that there has to be broad and sweeping "policies" on what to think of it and how to use it.

I'll blame it on leftists, you can blame it on whoever.

Re:I think the idea is...

[OrangeSpyderMan]

The Internet has given the "common man" direct access to politicians and information about political topics.

Pardon? Direct access? You mean being able to send an email to your local MP/governor/député? People have always been able to do this with snail mail. By "information about political topics" i guess you mean the stuff that newspapers and TV news have been reporting for years. Direct access to information is hearing it from the horses mouth, not reading it on Yahoo news.

I regret to say that the common man has no more direct access than, say, 20 years ago, especially the common man that doesn't have internet. All that has happened is the "lazy man" has found a way to send his opinions and read other people's without getting out of his house. I don't necessarily think of this as a good thing since the opinions of a great deal of people that cannot be pestered to go to the trouble of expressing them outside of their own homes are often, sadly, not worth listening to.

The change in political activism will, I think, be felt essentially by the broadening of the divide between people who read about things on the web and mouth off on Slashdot and those who, because they can't (no internet) or won't (having real beliefs) do this, get out and try and change things.

Does this statement make sense?

[f00zbll]

"How do we learn fast enough so that we are learning faster than the world changes?" asked Mr Graham, "if we are not learning faster than the world changes then we cannot possibly control it."

Does anyone else see a logical flaw in that argument? It's not like knowledge == control. If knowledge was measurable in quantity and quality, then the statement might make sense. But I've yet to see compelling proof that such measurement is practicle or desireable. Since when did we have control over technology? The statement in that context almost implies we have control over "it" and that some how we will loose "control over it."

It seems like they still have a lot of work to do, like defining what "it" is and how to go about measuring "it". Otherwise, it will just be a truck load of political jargons.

Normalization of Sexual 'Deviancy'

[Bonker]

It broadens the mind by introducing you to subgenres of pr0n that you never knew existed.

While the above post was joking, the idea is true. The internet has done more to make sexuality and sexual practices that were 'deviant' before the mid 1990's into more normal every day things.

In some respects this is very good. People who were otherwise unable to express themselves now have an outlet. People can find partners and build relationships that they would never have had a chance to in the past.

In some respects this is very bad. People who are truly sick-- those who sexually molest children to get their jollies-- are lulled into a sense of normalcy by the apparent 'commonness' of their illness.

Better than our US "studies"

[ianscot]

The story was in the BBC and the Research center's in Oxford, so I guess it shouldn't surprise me that they actually seem to be studying the 'net -- rather than, say, advocating a reactionary response to it.

Our U.S. equivalent, of course, might be Carnegie Mellon University -- from which we got all sorts of The Internet is Soooooo Scary "studies" for a while. (Remember the Time Magazine article back in 1994 or so that claimed 75% of all Web traffic was pRon? That was based on a C-M U paper. The more recent "study" that said people who browsed a lot tended to be depressed and socially isolated? Guess what University published it. Somebody at Carnegie Mellon has a hateful thing going on, seems like.)

It's advocacy over actual information, as far as U.S. pop media's appetite for "studies" goes.

Speak for yourself, I'm looking for motives

[Interrobang]

we need to pay politicians and bureaucrats to tell us what to do in cyberspace... the one place where the 1st Amendment should reign supreme...

Hmm, last I checked, I don't have a 1st Amendment in my Constitution, and "cyberspace," being, as nearly as I can define it, not really a "place" at all so much as a metaphor for a place, doesn't de facto or de jure fall under completely US jurisdiction (no matter what you all might think cough Sklyarov cough), that's an extremely Americocentric way of putting it.

Now free speech, on the other hand, freedom of the press, perhaps, and certainly multilateralism and international cooperation, I'll go for.

In any case, we don't need stodgy academics, consolidationist free-market wet-dream media moguls, or anyone else turning the internet into television with fewer moving parts (there's a reason I don't watch television!) -- nor in preaching the scripture that the freedom and openness of the internet are an illusion that should be dispelled as soon as possible (to what end?).

As with all agendists of every stripe, I have to ask what this guy's ulterior motives are. Can some kind Slashdotter with some time on their hands find out who's (which media company, dare I venture?) paying him?

Re:It is not 'deviancy' - it is 'perversion'

[Dirtside]

I firmly believe that promiscuity and homosexuality both constitute being 'truly sick'.

I would be astonished to discover that you believe this for any reason other than that you are scared of sex and sexuality, or have perhaps been fed these beliefs without analyzing them critically or empirically.

Modern society is learning the hard way that you can't encourage perversion and expect people to act morally. When we all grasp this basic truth, the world will be a lot better off.

This is thankfully a meaningless bit of bluster backed up by nothing. My wife and I live in West Hollywood, the gayest place in Southern California, and almost without exception, every gay person I've met has been friendly, outgoing, and, contrary to your unhelpful generalization, quite moral.

Homosexuals don't get to choose who they're attracted to any more than heterosexuals do. My advice to you is to go find a gay or lesbian group, get to know some of its members, and hopefully you'll learn that they are, in most ways, the same as rest of us.

But then, that idea probably scares you, doesn't it?

Re:It is not 'deviancy' - it is 'perversion'

[Dirtside]

but common sense tells us that this is unnatural

Actually, no, it's usually the Christian Bible that tells us this is unnatural, or other such works of man. There are animals in nature that engage in homosexual play, mostly chimps and other apes who are closely related to us (which is probably not a coincidence). An organism that does not reproduce because it is homosexual is unlikely to propagate its genes, but this does not automatically translate to "morally wrong," as your usage of terms like "unnatural" connotes. Sentient, able-minded humans who are homosexual have every right to live their lives as they see fit. Only if you believe that every human has a moral imperative to reproduce as much as possible, can a homosexual be logically considered "ill."

However, those who pride themselves on disease instead of attempting to free themselves of it are fairly obviously unstable in some way.

You have yet to establish that homosexuals are suffering from anything that can reasonably be called "disease." Your definition of disease, from the beginning of the paragraph, appears to be, "Anything which hinders an organism's reproduction," but you have not specified why this is a good definition. Dictionary.com's entry for "disease" does not mention reproductive fitness.

I do not deny that there may be a fair number of people who are openly homosexual but otherwise largely moral.

You did deny this, or at the very least imply it strongly, when you said:

Modern society is learning the hard way that you can't encourage perversion and expect people to act morally.

While this doesn't explicitly say that perversion = immorality, the obvious consequent is that people who are perverted will be immoral.

The fact that plenty of people in mental hospitals across the world are nonviolent doesn't mean it's time to give each of them a machete and release them; the same principle applies to the class of mentally ill under discussion.

No, it does not. The nonviolent mentally ill you reference (presumably people who cannot cope on their own in society) are distinctly different from homosexuals, who can (and do) cope on their own, and are for the most part indistinguishable from heterosexuals. I could as easily label as "mentally ill" those who claim the existence of a benevolent (but undetectable) superbeing who divinely intervenes with human affairs, leaving no concrete evidence of his passing. There is no reason that consenting adults should not be allowed to do as they will, so long as their actions do not harm a nonconsenting other.