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

Effects of the Net

[deadhammer]

The Net has great and ponderous effects, such as creating studies to show the great and ponderous effects of the net.

well...

[chegosaurus]

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

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

Surely this kind of study is redundant?

[ites]

Surely the impact of the Net is totally obvious.
The Net lowers the cost of communication.
This lets people create much larger and more efficient network.
Activities that depend on such networks (research, digital theft, collaborative research, free software development, certain kinds of commerce) have and will continue to boom.
Activities that depend on the high cost of communications (old media, encyclopedia salesmen, and other information cartels) have and will continue to decline.
This seems to be stating the obvious... what else will a study turn up? That we are evolving resistance to RSI?

Re:Political Debate Indeed

[October_30th]

Swinging a punch to a policeman or a politician is a common form of political debate in the UK. You see, the politicians will punch you back.

Me and the Net

[X!0mbarg]

Well, I got so see more Pr0n than I ever imagined. Saw stuff that made me want to wash my eyes with liquid drano. Downloaded a Lot of useless crap. Became addicted to Online Comics. Made a handful of new friends. Got myself an e-mail account through a friend in Oslo. Learned that there are a Lot of ways to cheat...

Search engines are my friends!

So much data. So little HD space...

Re:Interesting, but how much will it proove?

[Anonymous Coward]

if the internet changed fundamentally every six months, the average person wouldn't be able to understand it enough to use it.

The average person doesn't understand the Internet enough to actually use it! Hell, most people have trouble with the difference between "Preview" and "Subm

Cliff Stoll had some comments on this...

[CoolVibe]

...regarding the effects of the internet on social life and people.

Check out the realvideo (yeah sorry) technetcast presentation here . It's refreshing, to the point and funny. And oh so typically Cliff Stoll-ian. :)

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.

What the Net Did To Me

[Skirwan]

Mostly The Net just bored me. Sandra Bullock did the best she could with the script, but the entire thing was exactly the sort of paranoid FUD that makes people think they can get sick by using a computer with a virus.

Now, The Computer Wore Tennis Shoes? Classic!

--
Damn the Emperor!

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.

Thanks, Eli

[sam_handelman]

"We must save the internet from its founding myth that it is good for democracy and is open and cannot be regulated."

Oh, is *that* why we need to be told what to do? For DEMOCRACY?

Eli Noam is an academic who moonlights as a beurecrat. Based on his webpage, he doesn't seem to advocate censorship exactly - he wants to somehow use regulation to encourage people to talk one another when they have diverse social backgrounds. This is a laudable goal, and I'm certainly no anti-government nut - but this is a stupid target for regulation. Like regulation to make people be nice.

He complains about centralization of information. This has NOT been my experience with the web - EXCEPT for academic journals. If he wants regulation to require peer-reviewed academic journals to make their content available for free online; well, that would be great. I'd support that 100%. A journal that wants money shouldn't publish publically funded research.

The fact is - the protocols (TCP/IP, http/html) fascilitate free, open and DIVERSE exchanges of communication. I can't think of any changes I'd make that would encourage people to interact with people of diverse experience. If there were improvements to these fundamental protocols, there would some justification in legislating them (you'd get them no other way), but I don't think his goals are well enough defined, or the effects well enough understood, to even talk about this as an option at this juncture.

His op-ed pieces are particularly enlightening if you really care what he thinks.

Only Research Center??

[redragon]

They must be on crack. There are many different places looking at these sorts of things:

http://dir.yahoo.com/Social_Science/Science__Tec hn ology__and_Society_Studies/

Seriously...most places that do cultural analysis of science are also looking at the effects of the internet.

Disabled

[tsa]

For disabled people that don't leave the house often it's even more of a godsent than for 'normal' people. Finally they have a cheap and vast and versatile tool for getting and sending information!

ObQuestion

[extra88]

What kind of beer?

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.

Re:Normalization of Sexual 'Deviancy'

[PygmyTrojan]

Ahhh yes, thanks internet, for letting me now that it's okay to take a crap in my girlfriend's mouth.

The net.

[Anonymous Coward]

The net taught me enough shocking things about rocking the casbah, that there would be small challenge in making a sailor blush.

It taught me that humanity itself is plagued with idiots; not just the populace of the United States.

On the plus side, because of the net, I learned what real music sounds like. On the down side, the RIAA is now more determined than ever before to shove crap into my ears, all because of the net.

I think, however, that the most important thing that has happened to me because of the net is this: Because of the internet, I've been able to 'own' camping bitches all the way over in France.

Cheese eating quad-camping surrender monkeys.

It's the economy, stupid

[RealBeanDip]

The 'net has allowed us to capatilize on our synergy while moving to a B2B model and later B2C. During this time we leveraged our user community and capatilized through eCommerce.

Then we ran out of funding and went broke. But it was a fun couple-a-few years.

Re:It's the economy, stupid

[ianscot]

If only, if only we could have thought outside the box in order to leverage our core competencies... Moving forward, we'll just have to grow something-or-other.

(I cashed out my synergy when the market on that was high.)

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'

[CaffeineAddict2001]

News media is biased. Those reports don't sit on shelves they just go to christian media sources.

You can find a study to point out the good merits of just about anything.

None of this silly crap really matters though.

Homos arn't nearly as much a threat as all the "good christian people" driving around in their SUVs, breeding like rabbits (condoms are the devil too ya know!), wasting resources, and then voting for their government to blast 2nd and 3rd world countries off the map to sustain their way of life.

Atleast pr0n freaks are only hurting themselves.

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.