Have internet forums made people lazy?
- Thread starter David R
- Start date
Bump. Thought I'd do something interesting for my 5000th post...
Man, looking back on this now the internet forums of 2012 seem like a high-order of scholars compared to the average aquarium-related Facebook group. With 'fake news', ' alternative facts' and a generation who are either hyper-sensitive or keyboard warriors (or sometimes both!) good advice is often written off as negativity (or "haters") if it challenges your own precious feelings, or conversely is dished out by someone out to score points by trashing others rather than genuinely trying to help people learn. There's still a lot of good, a lot of people learning and exchanging information and ideas, but the negative aspects seem greatly increased too. It's great being able to instantly share pictures and video straight from your phone, especially given the improvements in quality since I made this thread, but I'm also a little saddened that the trend seems to be heading away from proper discussion to just pics, clicks and likes. The idea of searching through old posts to find information to answer your own question is dead, and I feel like the fact that FB is driven by its ability to generate advertising revenue is to blame for a big part of that.
So cheers to all those who still take the time to construct and write out lengthy, detailed, nuanced, edited, considered, researched and thoughtful posts on forums such as this one. Interesting to see where we're at in another seven years...
Man, looking back on this now the internet forums of 2012 seem like a high-order of scholars compared to the average aquarium-related Facebook group. With 'fake news', ' alternative facts' and a generation who are either hyper-sensitive or keyboard warriors (or sometimes both!) good advice is often written off as negativity (or "haters") if it challenges your own precious feelings, or conversely is dished out by someone out to score points by trashing others rather than genuinely trying to help people learn. There's still a lot of good, a lot of people learning and exchanging information and ideas, but the negative aspects seem greatly increased too. It's great being able to instantly share pictures and video straight from your phone, especially given the improvements in quality since I made this thread, but I'm also a little saddened that the trend seems to be heading away from proper discussion to just pics, clicks and likes. The idea of searching through old posts to find information to answer your own question is dead, and I feel like the fact that FB is driven by its ability to generate advertising revenue is to blame for a big part of that.
So cheers to all those who still take the time to construct and write out lengthy, detailed, nuanced, edited, considered, researched and thoughtful posts on forums such as this one. Interesting to see where we're at in another seven years...
Bump. Thought I'd do something interesting for my 5000th post...
Man, looking back on this now the internet forums of 2012 seem like a high-order of scholars compared to the average aquarium-related Facebook group. With 'fake news', ' alternative facts' and a generation who are either hyper-sensitive or keyboard warriors (or sometimes both!) good advice is often written off as negativity (or "haters") if it challenges your own precious feelings, or conversely is dished out by someone out to score points by trashing others rather than genuinely trying to help people learn. There's still a lot of good, a lot of people learning and exchanging information and ideas, but the negative aspects seem greatly increased too. It's great being able to instantly share pictures and video straight from your phone, especially given the improvements in quality since I made this thread, but I'm also a little saddened that the trend seems to be heading away from proper discussion to just pics, clicks and likes. The idea of searching through old posts to find information to answer your own question is dead, and I feel like the fact that FB is driven by its ability to generate advertising revenue is to blame for a big part of that.
So cheers to all those who still take the time to construct and write out lengthy, detailed, nuanced, edited, considered, researched and thoughtful posts on forums such as this one. Interesting to see where we're at in another seven years...
Congrats on your 5000th post -- and I was just reading the very 1st post in this thread (without even noticing the 2012 date and before reading this post), and I was saying to myself this golly this guy is raising some very valid points.
Unfortunately the sad truth seems to be in many respects what you refer to has gotten worse over the last 7 years -- esp. in regard to overall attention span in society, which is now confirmed less than a goldfish's lol.
If you try to write lengthy, detailed, nuanced, edited, considered, researched and thoughtful posts nowadays on MFK (or most other social media for that matter), it's very likely people will either not bother to read your posts or criticize you for 'writing a book'. Personally I don't let this overly affect my writing style and do what I can to help preserve our ever-withering attention spans, even if it may make more less 'popular' lol.
I've been keeping fish before the internet was a household thing. So, I had to learn through reading books and lots of trials and errors. Fortunately, this was before home ownership and children, so I had plenty of time. Nowadays, however, life is way too busy, so I want/need my info fast. Personally, I like learning new things in months, rather than years.
Computing machines, and people, have changed a lot . . . Like nobody ever imagined.
I will be 65 soon. I built a simple computer in 1968, when most people didn't know what a computer did, and NOBODY knew what they could/would become. Anybody today would see my primitive machine and wonder why somebody plugged 300 little wires into a box? It could do math!
You all can DL an app.
I built a machine!
By 1960 my dad had been working for years in the system to computerize military radar and microwave communications. They were beaming megawatts of microwaves across 60 miles of open ocean to link offshore radar data with land based radar, all across the US/Canadian border. He tracked Sputnik and the early Mercury flights on radar, in a blockhouse war room right out of Dr Strangelove.
In 1968-69 I was at a rural school in Minnesota, and after I said everyone would have to learn binary to use computers, the whole hockey team wanted to beat me up. That year we sent a computer to the moon (!) and if I'd been able to do hexadecimal, I'm sure my dismembered my body would be still buried under the rink at Chester Creek.
By 2000 computers had all but taken over every business and social activity. An entire generation of young adults has known nothing less. If you took them away . . . bodies. Lots of them. Dead ones.
In the beginning, you had to know everything a machine did, because you designed it and built it to do that thing.
Nowadays you do not have to know much, because the computer tells you what you need. What you need to know is built into the device. Your info isn't actually coming from people anymore. It comes from a machine.
And MFKers simply became part of the eternal machine.
How much of dead folks lives is spread across the Web Pages? In the cloud? On the chain? Forever?
Because the flipside of this wonder is mass ignominy. Future people will look at this stuff we posted and wonder why we were all such idiots?
Why would we complain about what has always been?
I will be 65 soon. I built a simple computer in 1968, when most people didn't know what a computer did, and NOBODY knew what they could/would become. Anybody today would see my primitive machine and wonder why somebody plugged 300 little wires into a box? It could do math!
You all can DL an app.
I built a machine!
By 1960 my dad had been working for years in the system to computerize military radar and microwave communications. They were beaming megawatts of microwaves across 60 miles of open ocean to link offshore radar data with land based radar, all across the US/Canadian border. He tracked Sputnik and the early Mercury flights on radar, in a blockhouse war room right out of Dr Strangelove.
In 1968-69 I was at a rural school in Minnesota, and after I said everyone would have to learn binary to use computers, the whole hockey team wanted to beat me up. That year we sent a computer to the moon (!) and if I'd been able to do hexadecimal, I'm sure my dismembered my body would be still buried under the rink at Chester Creek.
By 2000 computers had all but taken over every business and social activity. An entire generation of young adults has known nothing less. If you took them away . . . bodies. Lots of them. Dead ones.
In the beginning, you had to know everything a machine did, because you designed it and built it to do that thing.
Nowadays you do not have to know much, because the computer tells you what you need. What you need to know is built into the device. Your info isn't actually coming from people anymore. It comes from a machine.
And MFKers simply became part of the eternal machine.
How much of dead folks lives is spread across the Web Pages? In the cloud? On the chain? Forever?
Because the flipside of this wonder is mass ignominy. Future people will look at this stuff we posted and wonder why we were all such idiots?
Why would we complain about what has always been?
Everything in books is way too concrete....in black and white. The one thing that I like about the forums is that you can keep asking the same question over and over until someone gives you the answer you like thus relieving yourself of responsibility when things go sideways. It is actually very liberating not to be at fault. Ever.
The original title posits blaming laziness on the internet, when every convenience of modern life has fostered laziness, and hopelessness, since the industrial revolution began.
But only among the lazy and hopeless.
The small percentage of not-lazy folks still run the world.
Just as they did when the world was young.
But only among the lazy and hopeless.
The small percentage of not-lazy folks still run the world.
Just as they did when the world was young.
Absolutely. I can't recall if my original title was deliberately worded that way to grab attention or if it was just poorly worded, but obviously people have always been lazy and what we see online is only a manifestation of that aspect of human nature.
At the end of the post I asked "Have we as people of the internet age become so reliant on being told everything we're losing the ability to research and learn for ourselves?" and that's really what I wanted to get a feeling for. I myself have changed a lot in the last seven years (as you mentioned people do) and, perhaps ironically, thanks to the internet I've learned a heck of a lot more about human nature and basic psychology, and when I look back at that post now I think it's more complex than people simply preferring to be spoon-fed information rather than seeking it out themselves due to laziness. Perhaps the internet hasn't greatly increased peoples laziness, but it has (IMO) seriously increased our love of having our confirmation biases confirmed. As The Morning pointed out, you can now just ask a question and keep asking until you find someone who tells you what you wanted to hear, then disregard "the haters" who say something anything doesn't fit. And really that's a lot worse than just being a little lazy!
People are too lazy now, they do fighting online instead of in person, they meet their spouse on apps instead of person, shoot I just grubhubbed some food because Arby’s too far from me.
