The internet

Unknown said:

However, it facilitates crimes to a rather horrendous level.

I mean so does the post. and the telephone. Mail fraud used to be a big thing before the internet as telephones fraud is still an issue, especially for the elderly. Terrorists use the phone and letters to arrange their activities. People send letters stuffed with bombs or anthrax. Poison pen letters were a thing. I'm sure back in the day someone said the post or the phone was ruining society.

Unknown said:

It also isolates people and childhood appears to have drastically changed because of it.

Childhoods have drastically changed but I don't think the internet is chifley to blame. Bullying for example isn't new. It's just moved online like lots of other things. It wouldn't disappear if the internet did. People have isolated each other because of social changes beyond the internet. The workplace has become less social, possibly a side effect of a more litigious and politically correct society. People move about more for work and study which makes it harder for them to put down roots and maintain long term face to face social networks, That's really more a product of economic forces and globalisation.

Children these days are much more supervised in real life because the average parent has been scared into thinking under every rock is a dirty old man in a trench coat about to run off with their child under their arm. Ultimately on some level kids can't have full social lives without some autonomy. Unless the adults get lost and let them spend time some unsupervised with their peers.

The internet itself has changed though. It's become less social. Partly this is driven by enshittification (look it up) but also the boggy man that cyber stalking has become. Because ultimately all active attempts to get to know someone new can seem like stalking or harassment if cast in the wrong light, and people have become hyper sensitive to this.

I mean people actually worry these days about employers checking their social media for controversial things. The issue is not that controversial opinions / activities are out there for all to see but rather employers care in the first place. Because fundamentally people should be hired for their skills not their views or personal hobbies.

These are things driven by social changes. Political correctness, the erosion of the work / personal life divide, fear about violent crime (especially towards kids) even though statistically it's going down, globalisation, geographical mobility, generally increasing levels of financial instability, a more litigious society etc.

I think one of the biggest causes in childrens lives is the car, when I was a child, (somewhere back in the mists of time) children played outside in the street, it was expected and normal, you'd always get someone complaining about the noise or something, but everyone ignored them. Sometime in the 80's cars became more common and the streets cluttered with parked cars leaving little space to play, of course people starting driving faster too and children weren't so welcome on the streets.

There have always been predators, I remember being flashed at in the park when I was a child, we ran after the bloke throwing sticks and stones at him. What most people still don't want to think about is that most predators are people known to the victims and trusted.

I disagree about political correctness being a cause of harm, do we really want to go back to when we would of been called invalid, put into care, our parents told to forget about us, to not have the opportunities we have. To go back to times when 'No Dogs. No Blacks and No Irish' were legitimate signs to have on your hotel, B&B or pub? Do we want to go back to times when DV was wasn't even paid lip service to as a problem?

I'm glad I'm not the only person who recognises the enshitification of the internet, whenever I've mentioned it before I've either been ignored or told off.

Humans have a tendency to look back at the past and see some sort of golden age when things were better, when actually they weren't, we tend to look back at the between the wars era as a golden age, convieniently forgetting the depression and the Jarrow marches, or we look to the post war period as a golden age, an age when women were forced out of the work place and into the home, communities were broken up by slum clearances and the air quality was so poor people literally couldn't breathe.

TheCatWoman said:

I think one of the biggest causes in childrens lives is the car

There were still plenty of kids playing in the street in the early 90s when there were plenty of cars around. I would say kids playing outdoors kind of stopped around the mid to late 90s. Again, I blame sensational child murder coverage on the news. I remember as a teenage boy in the 90s trying desperately to get to the loo down this narrow corridor. And there was this mum and toddler walking 2 abreast terribly slowly. So, I try to push between them and this mum grabs me, practically screams in my face accusing me of trying to abduct her kid. It was the 90s where parents became hysterically and irrationally afraid of child abduction.

TheCatWoman said:

I disagree about political correctness being a cause of harm, do we really want to go back to when we would of been called invalid, put into care, our parents told to forget about us, to not have the opportunities we have. To go back to times when 'No Dogs. No Blacks and No Irish' were legitimate signs to have on your hotel, B&B or pub? Do we want to go back to times when DV was wasn't even paid lip service to as a problem?

But there is a difference between political correctness and non-discrimination. In fact, very often what people think is politically correct is discriminatory. For example, when bosses release job adverts saying, 'we don't have enough minority group X so will only want minority group X applicants' that's actually illegal discrimination. But in the mind of the boss, it's politically correct. Political correctness is often about avoiding offence and avoiding the appearance of victimising minority groups. Non-discrimination is about being fair no matter how that looks or who gets offended by it.

I'm not saying all change is good or bad. I'm just saying a lot of the 'problems with the internet' are not new problems at all but old ones that relocated to the internet. The things the internet has changed are often overlooked in favour of old problems in new clothing.

I can think of a few things the internet has changed:

• Making it easy to leak whistle blow anonymously (eg wiki leaks)
• Making copyright piracy almost impossible to control (eg the pirate bay, sci-hub)
• Making it really hard to supress information (eg stories of human rights abuses or breaking super injunctions)
• Making porn almost ubiquitously available to everyone 24/7 with very little effort.

Problems we had before the internet:

• Stalking
• Fraud
• Child Abuse / Porn
• Spam
• Terrorism
• Racially motivated abuse
• Threatening messages
• Bullying

TheCatWoman said:

I think one of the biggest causes in childrens lives is the car

There were still plenty of kids playing in the street in the early 90s when there were plenty of cars around. I would say kids playing outdoors kind of stopped around the mid to late 90s. Again, I blame sensational child murder coverage on the news. I remember as a teenage boy in the 90s trying desperately to get to the loo down this narrow corridor. And there was this mum and toddler walking 2 abreast terribly slowly. So, I try to push between them and this mum grabs me, practically screams in my face accusing me of trying to abduct her kid. It was the 90s where parents became hysterically and irrationally afraid of child abduction.

TheCatWoman said:

I disagree about political correctness being a cause of harm, do we really want to go back to when we would of been called invalid, put into care, our parents told to forget about us, to not have the opportunities we have. To go back to times when 'No Dogs. No Blacks and No Irish' were legitimate signs to have on your hotel, B&B or pub? Do we want to go back to times when DV was wasn't even paid lip service to as a problem?

But there is a difference between political correctness and non-discrimination. In fact, very often what people think is politically correct is discriminatory. For example, when bosses release job adverts saying, 'we don't have enough minority group X so will only want minority group X applicants' that's actually illegal discrimination. But in the mind of the boss, it's politically correct. Political correctness is often about avoiding offence and avoiding the appearance of victimising minority groups. Non-discrimination is about being fair no matter how that looks or who gets offended by it.

I'm not saying all change is good or bad. I'm just saying a lot of the 'problems with the internet' are not new problems at all but old ones that relocated to the internet. The things the internet has changed are often overlooked in favour of old problems in new clothing.

I can think of a few things the internet has changed:

• Making it easy to leak whistle blow anonymously (eg wiki leaks)
• Making copyright piracy almost impossible to control (eg the pirate bay, sci-hub)
• Making it really hard to supress information (eg stories of human rights abuses or breaking super injunctions)
• Making porn almost ubiquitously available to everyone 24/7 with very little effort.

Problems we had before the internet:

• Stalking
• Fraud
• Child Abuse / Porn
• Spam
• Terrorism
• Racially motivated abuse
• Threatening messages
• Bullying