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Internet Is Having a Midlife Crisis (bbc.com)

Posted by msmash on from the perspective dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet, pioneering entrepreneur Baroness Lane-Fox has told the BBC. The Lastminute.com founder also called for a "shared set of principles" to make the web happier and safer. She said the internet had done much good over the last 30 years. But she said too many people had missed out on the benefits and it was time to "take a step back". "The web has become embedded in our lives over the last three decades but I think it's reached an inflexion point, or a sort of midlife crisis," she told Radio 4's Today programme. Baroness Lane-Fox co-founded travel booking site Lastminute.com in 1998 before going on to sell the firm for 577m pound seven years later. She described the early days of the internet as being "full of energy and excitement," and akin to the "wild West". "There was this feeling that suddenly, with this access to this new technology, you could start a business from anywhere," she said. However, she said that while technology had become a hugely important sector of the UK economy, it had not fulfilled its early potential.

7 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. If one wants to recapture that Wild West energy... by forkfail · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ... I cannot think of a better way than imposing more regulation.

    And if she thought that the 'net was a "nice" place in its early days, well, I suspect that she missed huge swaths of usenet...

    With this said, she is right. The character of the 'net has changed. But her own response seems to be very midlife in and of itself: let's try to recapture a childhood that cannot be returned to.

    --
    Check your premises.
  2. The problem is not the Internet by William+Baric · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Cyber-bullying" affecting "young people's self-esteem" is not a problem. The problem is that young people from Western countries are now unable to cope with "bad" words which might hurt their precious little feelings. It's not "the Internet is having a midlife crisis", it's "Western civilization is crumbling".

    1. Re:The problem is not the Internet by imidan · · Score: 5, Informative

      The problem is that young people from Western countries are now unable to cope with "bad" words which might hurt their precious little feelings.

      It's not just that people are unable to cope. It's also their apparent inability to disengage from a conversation they find hurtful or upsetting. If a person gets into a flame war and just keeps going, maybe they should just... stop? I dunno, maybe that's a coping mechanism in itself. If a Facebook chat made me want to actually hang myself, I'd probably stop using Facebook. But a lot of people, especially young people, don't seem to have that.

      Younger people interact more online than in person today, even when they're sitting in the same room with each other. They still have the same peer pressures to conform and belong, and on various web sites and apps they can get a quantified measure of how well they do so. They go on sites like Reddit and post stuff, much of it not original thought but memes (not just of the graphical variety, but also textual memes like Slashdot's old Natalie Portman/hot grits bit), and they are desperate for people to upvote so they feel like they're part of the club. They may delete a post if it's not popular enough. And, of course, some young people's cliques have always rewarded them for being cruel to people, so that continues.

      It's not just younger people. Middle-aged people do it, too, going on Facebook with "1 like=1 prayer" and posts that virtue signal to whatever group they belong. But it's all just people speaking into the echo chamber they've chosen and hoping they've posted at the right moment for their groupthink to be validated by repetition and points from the rest.

      With various points systems, we've gamified social status, and people are biologically wired to like to win games. Even on Slashdot, many years ago, we had visible numeric karma scores, and people got into stupid e-penis contests to see who could get a higher number. It wasn't so much fun when karma turned into classified ranges, and people stopped. We're not at the point depicted in that episode of Black Mirror yet, but we can see the seeds of it.

      It's a social problem, partly caused by the fact that we have this new technology for social interaction without many generations of behavioral norms, partly caused by the fact that anonymity and distance seems to encourage people to be shittier and more confrontational to each other. Likely with many other causes. But the solution almost certainly isn't a technological or legal one.

    2. Re:The problem is not the Internet by mjr167 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Because this is what they are teaching in schools. My 2nd grader was told by her teacher that "words hurt forever". I found this out while calming her down after her friend calling her 'mean' reduced her to tears.

      There is no "sticks and stones..." anymore. Now it's "words hurt more than hitting" and "words are unforgivable".

  3. once again... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The rise of cyber-bullying and monopolistic business practices has damaged trust in the internet

    Internet culture died around 1993..

    Since then, it has been stamped into the dirt by idiots who have begged for and bought with their own money: more surveillance, less freedom, more censorship, less end user control over their own devices, and a wholesale transfer of that control to megacorps. They've constantly favored Facebook and other data-broker intrusions into "private" communication, putting a few for-profit companies into gatekeeper roles over ever increasing swaths of the internet. They've punished open standards and open protocols, replacing them with closed, central control ones. They've removed the ability of people to defend themselves against that "cyber-bulling" by requiring more and more be tied to real world identities, which enables the bullies and denies the victims a key form of self defense.

    No... the internet died long before this "Baroness Lane-Fox" probably ever heard of it. She's part of the problem, not part of the solution.

  4. Weird article by Sumus+Semper+Una · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Things that have contributed to eroding my trust of the Internet to some degree:

    Proliferation of fake news (by which I mean ideological propaganda specifically designed to look like news but with incitement as its goal rather than information)
    Government (pick whichever one you want) sponsored spying
    Dodgy business practices by large, well-known, IT-focused companies
    Data breaches and other hacks
    Viruses
    Spam
    Advertisers trying to disguise their ads as if they were a natural part of the parent page
    Advertising by looking at metadata

    Things that have definitely not contributed to eroding my trust of the internet:

    Cyber bullying

  5. Re:Huh? by JohnFen · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The internet started sucking when it became big business, when it became "serious," when it was somehow important to trust it.

    This.

    Commercialization of the internet transformed internet culture into something very different, and worse.