The Internet and the Ecology of Media

(www.monsterguide.net)

I love how ideas come to me for these blog posts. One minute I have no idea what I want to write about, and then the next minute something grabs my attention and gives me an idea! That is exactly what happened for this post. I was unsure of what to write for The Ecology of Media post and was undecided on what technology to discuss. My attention quickly shifted from thinking of what I would write for this post to surfing the web. Then it hit me! Why not talk about the internet! (That just shows you how media dominates my life).

The internet is an amazing tool. It can be used as a library: finding information, gathering facts, and researching topics. It can be used for leisure: playing games, listening to music, and watching movies. Companies take advantage of the internet for marketing. The internet is a quick and easy way to introduce a company or product. Just recently, social networking sites, such as Facebook and Myspace, have created a form of interaction within the internet. You can chat with friends, e-mail others, share files. The uses for the internet are endless and new innovations are introduced every day.

In a Keynote Address delivered at the Inaugural Media Ecology Association Convention, Neil Postman explained how “a medium is a technology within which a culture grows; that is to say, it gives form to a culture’s politics, social organization, and habitual ways of thinking” (Postman). The internet has done just that. Our entire culture has changed and grown through the internet. How we interact with people has changed dramatically. Instead of talking to someone face-to-face, we can now instantly send them an instant message, or an e-mail. We can also instantly receive almost any information over the internet. A search engine, such as Google, can immediately find information for us. “In less then a second, Google can search billions of web pages to find the information we need” (www.google.com). How we receive information and how we socialize has been dramatically altered with the introduction of the internet.

However, there is a disadvantage to this amazing tool that we use to gather information and socialize. People are loosing social skills because we are no longer interacting with a person directly. We now interact with people through a technology; through the internet. How is a person going to improve their listening and speaking skills if we only have to type in order to talk to a person? Also, the quality of the information we are receiving through the internet is weak and poor. Yes, it may be fast and easy to receive, but isn’t it more important to get information that is reliable and trustworthy? In North America, the internet is not monitored or regulated. Therefore, anything is possible and anything is allowed. So even though we can instantly receive information, the quality of the information is greatly diminished. It seems that the faster information can travel, the easier it can be altered.

(blaugh.com)

So is the internet helping our culture, or is it tearing our culture apart? Is the internet an amazing technology that will make our lives easier, or is it a technology that is giving us unreliable information? Should we follow the poem that McLuhan gave to Postman that stated: “Say neither, it is blessed nor cursed. Say only, it is here” (Postman). Or should we act and stand up for a better technology to receive reliable information. These are hard questions to answer however, I feel that the internet will continue to grow and produce some interesting changes in the coming years.

Work Cited

Postman, Neil. Keynote Address. Inaugural Media Ecology Association Convention. Fordham University, New York, NY. 16June 2000.

Google Press Center. 2005. Google. 30 Sept. 2008. [http://www.google.com/press/funfacts.html]