The web is also access to almost all knowledge ever acquired by humanity
edit: I don't know if I would have chosen differently, if all were available in my youth.
edit2: I think do know. I probably spent much more time on video games than on Encarta.
In my case I'm not particularly intelligent (My IQ is probably about 110ish) but my ego drives to learn ever more difficult looking things, that and the having the attention span of a child (I've recently noticed I can barely read aloud without stumbling). Having the internet available to do that on my own terms is why I know anything at all today, I really don't do well being sat in a classroom.
I still do the usual gaming and the like, but I really don't buy that you can force people to learn if their hearts not in it (maybe my parents were too laissez-faire, who knows - if all goes to plan I'll be the first in the family to have a degree worth the paper it's written on).
My best friend had that kind of very-structured upbringing and I could just feel that I could run rings around him because I'd got to the same place (We ended up at the same University) the long way round - even though we're basically made of the same stock mentally.
That's my ode to the internet, anyway.
I do recognize, however, that I'm the exception and not the rule in this regard.
The internet now is very different than the internet I grew up on, and it isn't the future I hoped for (where I imagined everyone would learn as I did, directly benefiting from having access to much of humanity's knowledge).
I lament what the internet has turned into - the overwhelming success of centralized platforms, surveillance capitalism, viral misinformation, etc. I worry about how much worse this all may get once deep-fakes become commonplace...
P.S. I also played video games - but overall I spent more time reading and learning/building things than playing games.
The kind of knowledge that facilitates economic development is of that sort, it's institutional and tacit. In How Asia works Joe Studwell makes an interesting observation. When South Korea and Taiwan had already taken off economically, significant parts of the population still could not read. The expansion of education lagged, not preceded economic growth.
Beaming markup text around the world is not all that it's made out to be for real world development.
Medical malpractice happens all the time, the comparison isn't invalid. The difference is the cost to the user, i.e. building yourself an echo chamber is free whereas even a suspiciously cheap (say) plastic surgeon is not.
This argument works on multiple levels, the internet has crackpots on it but it also has easily indexable alternatives who are only n degrees away from offline authority figures. The issue is more to do with psychology than the internet's intrinsic (sociological) properties.
For general knowledge, Wikipedia is only useful in handful of mostly European languages.
Schools pretty much force you to at least know the basics to get a passing grade. The web only helps if you have self-initiative.
The internet makes massive difference in availability of movies with subtitles you can watch over and over, songs, later easy to read blogs. Discussion forums also provide super simple english to begin to read. Books and articles are too hard in comparison, both in vocabulary and sentence structure.
Duolingo is massive thing.
Yes, teacher is necessary too. But if you actually want your kids to learn other language, the web and games available easily for free now make massive massive difference.
This is such a lie. Can you point me to a sustainable website with useful knowledge?
Almost all knowledge has been artificially fenced off in order to allow the elite to extract rents from it. Patents and copyrights monopolize vital production processes, and put it in the hands of knowledge Capitalists.
"Information is power. But like all power, there are those who want to keep it for themselves. The world's entire scientific and cultural heritage, published over centuries in books and journals, is increasingly being digitized and locked up by a handful of private corporations. Want to read the papers featuring the most famous results of the sciences? You'll need to send enormous amounts to publishers like Reed Elsevier." [1]
Wendy Liu adds:
"Place Silicon Valley in its proper historical context and you see that, despite its mythology, it’s far from unique. Rather, it fits into a pattern of rapid technological change which has shaped recent centuries. In this case, advances in information technology have unleashed a wave of new capabilities. Just as the internal combustion engine and the growth of the railroads created Rockefeller, and the telecommunications boom created AT&T, this breakthrough enabled a few well-placed corporations to reap the rewards. By capitalising on network effects, early mover advantage, and near-zero marginal costs of production, they have positioned themselves as gateways to information, giving them the power to extract rent from every transaction.
Undergirding this state of affairs is a set of intellectual property rights explicitly designed to favour corporations. This system — the flip side of globalisation — is propagated by various trade agreements and global institutions at the behest of the nation states who benefit from it the most. It’s no accident that Silicon Valley is a uniquely American phenomenon; not only does it owe its success to the United States’ exceptionally high defence spending — the source of its research funding and foundational technological breakthroughs — that very military might is itself what implicitly secures the intellectual property regime.
Seen in that light, tech’s recent development begins to look rather different. Far from launching a new era of global prosperity, it has facilitated the further concentration of wealth and power. By virtue of their position as digital middlemen, Silicon Valley companies are able to extract vast amounts of capital from all over the world. The most salient example is Apple: recently crowned the world’s most valuable company, Apple rakes in enormous quarterly profits even as the Chinese workers who actually assemble its products are driven to suicide.
Whereas we were once led to believe that the network society would produce an egalitarian world, we increasingly see tech as a machine for the commodification of information itself. Something that has the potential to be abundant is made artificially scarce, because capital finds it profitable to enclose the digital commons and dictate its terms of access. Facebook wants a monopoly over your social network so it can show you ads; Google is the internet’s directory; Netflix, Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music are your tollbooths for cultural production; Amazon is the gateway for your retail needs. These corporations serve social functions integral to modern life, [...] yet, not only are they not publicly owned, they are immune to any sort of democratic control." [2]
[1] Aaron Swartz, https://archive.org/stream/GuerillaOpenAccessManifesto/Goamj...
Can you stare a Global South kid in the face and tell them they have not been disinherited by the Global North + South Elite? That they (or their family) are poor because of 'bad choices'?
The most important qualification for a child anywhere in the world today is knowing English
I'm definitely where I am now because of the internet and Wikipedia.
At the same time, I agree with you about how the internet and technology have changed and continue to change. I agree that too much knowledge is still vaulted away, that a few companies have established large monopoly positions in tech, that they are destroying the egalitarian dream of the early internet.