What amusement park would be complete without the infamous World Wide Web. The internet is a complex, terrifying and thrilling roller coaster. It definitely has its highs and lows. On the one hand, I feel so incredibly lucky to be living in a time where publishing my own book is viable. Such an endeavor thirty years ago would have been an incredible challenge. Now, thanks to the world wide web, it takes little effort to get your book or anything at all out to the masses of people in the world.
Yet as I sing my praises of the internet (and my book!🤭), I am bombarded with cautionary tales as to the dangers of technology. And where do I find such information? On the internet of course. So, when I’m watching a commercial for relationship-saving question cards—to ask your significant other in an attempt to get couples off of their cell phones—and my mind wanders to thoughts of wouldn’t it be fantastic if this were an app?, I feel compelled to undergo some introspection.
What is so scary about the internet? There are the obvious horrors of child predators and identity theft and scam artists and innocent children being exposed to way too much sex and violence with no way of really sheltering them, because there is always a friend with a phone and internet access. But it is the sneaky, subtle horrors that are more recently coming to light. The way our brain is becoming addicted to being recognized is a manipulation of our very essence as human beings. We need those likes. When half as many people liked one photo as opposed to the previous photo, we go searching our brains for why, be it consciously or subconsciously, and change our behavior accordingly. We gravitate toward the more popular version of ourselves. We suppress the diversity of our appearance and thoughts.
We invite corporations into our minds. We willingly give information about our likes and interests via the websites we visit and the people we communicate with. We are the consumers, be it the actual products we buy or opinions or political views we offer. We provide the seller with the keys to our cognition.
Then there are the search engines! We use them so often that we barely realize there are human beings making algorithms controlling what we see and in what order. It feels like we are roaming free, learning things by our own choosing and intelligent exploration of the world wide web. The influence on our minds is so subtle that we genuinely believe our ideas are our own. You need not be asleep to experience inception.
So, what to do? The internet has been revolutionary in terms of the benefits it has given us. We connect in ways we never could have before. It gives us joy and provides us with an outlet for our creativity and it is definitely here to stay. Self-reflection and awareness of our predicament is the best we can do. Each time we approach the world wide web we need to ask ourselves, what am I this time, the spider or the fly?
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