Sir Tim Berners-Lee warns of widening digital divide
bbc.com
bbc.com
Magical realism and kids inventing their own play games in remote or poor villages is what happens when they don't have the internet to destroy creativity and distract people from using their imaginations.
I think the bigger issue has been the lengthening of working hours (imagine working just 9 to 5), and recently of course, the lockdowns.
Every revolutionary technology probably generated similar amounts of hysteria about the end of civilization - think about the printing press, industrialization (luddites), TVs, etc.
Eventually things should find a happy equilibrium, it just doesn't happen immediately. But it's assuming too much to think no solution today = no solution forever.
You think kids are going to use the internet for homework and research?
Competitive markets; our greatest engine of innovation and creation are racing to discover our biggest weaknesses and exploit them mercilessly.
This is inevitable — at its core ad-tech is a market in manipulation. There's no possible band-aid fix to square the circle: Markets innovate for their customers. Even google must constantly optimise to better manipulate the public or be beaten by those who will.*
We really need to get out from under this because machine learning makes it terrifying. We already have recovering addicts targetted to re-ignite their addictions. Eventually the technology will be good enough to make addicts of us all.
In my view the answer is to nationalize product discovery. Have a free to use government run product register. Let industries create open standards for product specifications and have real legal penalties for deception. Have product reviews with again real penalties for fraud.
Ban all paid promotion of products. Pay anyone selling adverts today 90% of last years revenue to run socially beneficial nonsense (call your gran, eat some veggies, go for a run). Until the whole thing is wound down.
* There's an interesting meta-possibility here where ad-tech platforms manipulate and bamboozle their real customers _the advertisers_. Facebook lying about video plays for example. This is probably the best outcome for society! Naturally the legal system punishes it sharply.
I'm pretty surprised to see this framed as if it's unrealistic. I have what you'd probably call a "very good" job, judging by my comp and the "coolness" of what I work on, and I work a hard 10-6. Based on the way people talk about it, I used to wonder when I'd hit the point in my career when I "arrived" and wasn't able to escape overworking, but I eventually accepted that this "common knowledge" is nonsense.
Work/life balance is ultimately a choice. Unless you're in dire poverty, you have degrees of freedom to trade off between work/life balance, comp, how engaging the work is, etc. I have a friend who makes 20% more than me, has 100x worse WLB and working environment, and has a less interesting job. I'm 100% sure I don't want his job... But I'm reasonably sure he wouldn't want mine (he's a workaholic and likes money a lot more than I do).
The major engagement-driven platforms are chasing metrics, to the detriment of the future.
Turns out, the world isn't quite as easy or quickly rewarding as Cookie Clicker.
https://i.ebayimg.com/images/i/262026482406-0-1/s-l1000.jpg
ProTip: if any humans manage to gather in large quantities in the future, all phones go into an unplugged microwave.
Or just gently enforce the norm that it's rude to look at your phone? I totally get that there are individual people who use their phone while socializing (in my experience, usually those who are dealing with some intense anxiety at the time), but most people understand that it's rude.
Is this just a cultural/class blindspot of mine? Do you really encounter social situations of 3+ people where everyone is on their phone at dinner?
Remarkable how someone can post this bad take on the internet on the internet forum for the most internet-connected people who work on the internet.
I'm old enough to remember when the internet was a liberatory technology. Even facebook/twitter were getting praised as recently as 2011 for the Arab Spring. And of course, even today, "cut off internet access" is a key checklist item for repressive governments.
That doesn't mean there aren't severe problems being caused by social networks, but we should be specific about what they are and targeted in our solutions.
The power of a nation state is based on its ability to maintain and control property, levy taxes and enforce compliance with its authority through a monopoly on violence. The premise that Google or any web platform has anything near the power of a nation state is ridiculous.
Also, Google isn't an independent state, they're a corporation and as such are subject to the laws of the nation(s) in which they operate. They do what they do because governments allow them to, not because they have the power to defy governments at will.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbKxUYl3WSE
FTFY
I agree! But, given that it exists, acting against it is hardly neutral either. I would argue - and this is deliberately a separate post from the top of thread - that many of the problems come from techno-libertarianism mistaking neutrality for impartiality, and assuming that a technology that doesn't explicitly mention politics is apolitical.
The internet allows true information to circumvent censors and permit the organisation of dissident groups against repression. It also permits the circulation of false or misleading information which has the effect of promoting violence and repression. Trying to distil this down to "internet good" or "internet bad" without having a clearly articulated politics is silly.
I was one of the early "adopters" of attached life, often neglecting "meatspace" pursuits in its favor.
We have created some huge problems for ourselves and for others, and we have to work hard on solving them.
There is no way that the internet is solely to blame for a child's creativity and imagination dying. Think about the billions and billions of creative projects on the internet.
I'm afraid that what you've done with that line is sort of romanticize some fictional past where kids were kids and men were men and women were women. There was always something that people tried to blame the death of creativity on - when I was a kid it was TV. When my grandfather was a kid, it was reading and books.
While I agree that "social" media is destroying many social conventions, I absolutely disagree that the internet is to blame for killing childhood creativity.
In my experience kids still love doing watercolors too.
I suspect building in 3D is going to provide some spatial benefits that drawing doesn't.
I always go back to the printing press analogy. It took about 50 to 100 years after its invention for serious societal change to start happening: The Reformation, Counter-Reformation, birth of Protestantism, etc.
Give it time. Networked communication is just getting started.
It took roughly 30 or 40 years for the press to be widely distributed around Europe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_spread_of_the_printing_...
> I think the ubiquity of the internet is what makes people comfortable to judge it as if it is mature.
Technology isn't going to stay exactly the same indefinitely. It just seems like a complete lack of imagination about the future to me.
People under 30 do not remember the world without Internet anymore; 25 years is a generation. That said, it is really too soon to proclaim any final judgments.
My parents didn't know what WiFi was, internet culture was still largely for nerds, etc.
Sure, the internet was a lot faster at becoming ubiquitous, but humans are still humans. Our society still needs time to adapt to internet, because 25 years old, as you point out, is really not that much on the scale of a human life or an institution or society.
100% agree. The internet provides knowledge right at your fingertips. It is amazing and sad at the same time that most people don't take full advantage of this.
> I'd rather off myself than go back to ye olden times
However, I have 99.999% confidence that you or most of us wouldn't do this. Human beings are extremely adaptable.
Social media is often a junk-food version of social interactions designed to sell ads to people. This leads to short attention spans and social anxieties. How many dinner tables have you sat at where couples sit there on their phones, and scarcely talk? This seems commonplace now...
The commercialization of the internet snatched destruction from the jaws of progress.
Once companies realized there was tons of money to be made in engagement-by-any-means-necessary, the genie was out of the bottle.
But there are still delightful isolated corners of the internet filled with brilliant imaginative creative people. Progress is still happening, but the mainstream's doing its level best to counter it.
As a side note, I have taken this opportunity recently to quit every social media account, and give up my smartphone.
Given the mental health crisis in young people (especially girls) stemming from social media use and ever present landmine of writing something inappropriate that will destroy your life later ... is that such a bad thing?
We're not talking about adults, we're talking about children. Yes, at some point they need to be exposed to the internet because the internet is a fact of life. I'm just not sold that any child (say, under the age of 14) who doesn't have access to the internet would somehow be crippled socially, culturally or academically. I have yet to see any study that suggests limiting access to the internet for children, or even no access internet is greatly detrimental. Contrast this with the FACT that there is a mental health crisis happening right now due social media use, and that there is no effective way to segrate internet from social media. So what is the argument here? What if there is no safe-level of social media use for children? By the way it is not uncommon to see children of tech-savvy parents, who may work in the industry, outright banning or tightly controlling internet access to their children.
But I'm sort-of in favor, to encourage technical skills. Set up society so kids have to learn pentesting to see boobs, and seven proxies to not get found out and told off by the local morality commisar. Instant generational competence upgrade.
1) There is such a thing as homeschool.
2) Schools are closed because of government mandated lockdowns. Not every region or nation decided to close their schools. In fact, most didn't. We're not even sure if that level of lockdown was good policy. Certainly there are credible epidemiologists who vehemently disagree with either lockdows or school closures.
3) The level of learning by remote instruction ... the data isn't out yet, but it isn't looking great. Maybe it's better than nothing but maybe not by much.
4) This is a generational pandemic that came suddenly and required big government bureaucracies to turn on a dime, and the internet to facilitate remote work was the most natural choice. But what are you saying, had this happened in 1992, no learning would be done? Or as the saying goes "necessity is the mother of invention" and we would find alternatives. We educated children just fine before the internet. In fact I suspect we would come up with something better than zoom classes.
5) But OK. Let's give the internet points for assisting with this pandemic. Let's draft laws that in the event of global pandemics you leverage the internet for remote learning. What is your argument for post-pandemic world?
But overall I vehemently disagree with the notion that: "No internet == no teaching."
He said access to the internet, not to Facebook or something. You know, that thing that has new wonders of the world and incredible educational content such as Wikipedia, YouTube, etc.
However, it also has a huge amount of toxic garbage, by no means restricted to a few "social media" sites.
Whether we can stem the deluge of junk, so that the average person's experience of the internet is actually a net positive, seems uncertain at this point. I don't think we've yet figured out how to manage this.
Access to food usually means access to both.
Internet has healthy stuff and unhealthy stuff.
Access to the internet means access to both.
Access to the internet by children is not.
We're talking about children. Internet is a fact of modern life and yes, at some point in their development, children will be exposed to it ... nobody is denying that. I fundamentally disagree however that internet access (limited or otherwise) is fundamentally necessary for child development, or academic success or education in general. That's bullcrap.
>And since now in many countries children socialize online, not just in real life, it's a necessary aspect of their life.
Yeah. I know. We're in the midst of a mental health crisis especially amongst girls brought on by social media use. That's not a good thing by the way.
I don't think that's true for many parts of the world, where the level of education attainable through standard means would hardly meet your standard of what is deemed reasonable. For such places, the internet is the only way for children to make steps towards that standard, albeit not easily.
I think that needs to be qualified because this kind of argumentation tends rely on naive and simplified tropes and stereotypes of various class groups.
I'm not trying to be flippant, but do literally any cursory search related to income and technology and you'll find many, many, many scholarly articles supporting that statement.
I have to assume that the lesson holds true for other countries, though I do need to admit ignorance to that fact.
And you think fiber internet, a MacBook Pro, iPad, and a big screen tv equates to better grades? Better learning? Better education? When it comes to education a book, pencil and paper and a teacher is all you really need. Heck, technology may even be a hindrance because of the distraction aspect.
There are countries with better educational outcomes even amongst households with a fraction of income to their American comparables.
It's not income level that's the issue. A child raised in a loving but low-income two-parent household will be fine growing up in this society. A child growing up in a single-parent home, especially where drugs or alcohol is an issue and living in a crime-filled, violent neighborhood (defund the police!) will be challenged. You can't just contrast wealth and not wealth. There are other factors that dominate.
No, but I (and this is not meant to be hateful) do believe you are out of touch with the reality of this situation. It's not about having fiber, it's about having anything except dial-up or a cell phone as an option. It's not about a macbook pro or an ipad, it's about not trying to do your homework on a shared family smartphone. The television isn't even a thing, not sure what that has to do with anything.
>There are countries with better educational outcomes even amongst households with a fraction of income to their American comparables.
That is a very bold statement. Please cite.
>It's not income level that's the issue. A child raised in a loving but low-income two-parent household will be fine growing up in this society.
This is also a SUPER bold statement. Please cite.
>You can't just contrast wealth and not wealth. There are other factors that dominate.
And yet, wealth and parent income are consistently shown to be the greatest predictor of future achievement, even when controlling for other variables such as ethnicity, gender, location. My citations:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/40037226?seq=1
https://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/schooled2lose/
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J134v11n02_05
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1519867?seq=1
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00490...
And that's just from 30 seconds of searching while out of the office. If I was at the office today, I could cite any number of the books and articles on my shelves on this subject, as this is literally what I have built my career in higher education on.
So you google around for 10 mins, to cherry pick studies, that you didn't even bother to read, as a way to confirm your preconceived conclusion? You think that this is a valid way of argument? Uh huh. Cherry picking data to fit a preconceived conclusion is how science is done ... right?
Right now we're graduating functionally illiterate kids at incredible rates. Tell me the MECHANISM (not correlation) by which low-income equals to illiteracy in the context of our society which provides schools, school-buses, books, and teachers. By the way, every single school in America is good and is staffed by good quality teachers.
Having grown up in my city's immigrant ghetto (surrounded by Eastern European, Iranian, Filipino and Hong Kong immigrants), in a low-income (but loving) household with no English knowledge, and being an immigrant myself, I always like to see how those who grew up privileged see everyone else. I really do want to know your MECHANISM of how low-income translates to illiteracy (as an example). And on a slight tangent, in my personal experience, the most lectures on poverty and privilege I get are from people who were born in the country and grew up firmly in the upper middle class.
I can guarantee you're going to find low-income households with academically high performing children, and here we're talking about just literacy (not even high academic achievement). Quickly enough you'll find that income is not a good gauge and that other factors dominate.
Our library has contactless pickup, so you can still get books. But only provided you first go the library website over the internet and reserve them.
Our library has a Kindle lending library, provided of course that you access the library website to check them out and download the book to your ~$100 Kindle device over the internet.
We closed school when we had no power for 4 days two years ago. To extend your logic, schools have created too much reliance on electricity. If this was 100 years ago, the buildings would be different and we wouldn't have needed to close schools for an extended period. That argument doesn't make sense or have a purpose, but it makes just as much sense as your argument, to me.
I don't understand what you're trying to say here, I guess is what I'm getting at.
He is making the point that young people have found it hard to learn over the lockdown because of not being able to have access to education. He said, "A shocking number of kids in the UK don't have meaningful connectivity."
This has nothing to do with the toxicity of social networks.
I believe that connection to educational services should be free for all families that can't afford it in the UK.
I mean do that if you don't want to dig holes and put cables in them.
Also, btw, do we have to say "Sir Tim Berners-Lee"? Call me postmodern, but idgaf if he's a Knight of the UK or the Jedi, it's just character spam. His name is "Tim Berners-Lee", no? (This man is a legend either way.) We say "Paul Graham" not "Dr. Paul Graham, Comp.Sci." and I would also call Professor Albus Dumbledore just Albus Dumbledore, I mean if there was a blogpost about him. :)
The fact that the queen or similar taps you on the shoulders is an implementation detail
If you want to be petty all you have to do to get a PhD is pass a viva - Two slightly bizarre french "physicists" come to mind
This gets lost in translation. I (in the US) tend to see it more like GP does as well.
Technically he's an " Officer of the Order of the British Empire", a bit anachronistic for sure :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_the_Garter
(Honi soit qui mal y pense)
No, that's "Mylord" to you.
The headline comes from the BBC so it is natural that they use his title. Elsewhere he might be referred to differently.
I see it as a harmless thing.
Just for fun, I'm going to waffle on about your comment a bit!
I think your outlook stems from the "individualist" movement and mindset that encourages everyone to see themselves as individuals separate from society and it's constructs. As we have all become a little bit more disconnected from society because of it, and our place within it has become less important, we don't see such achievements as being as important as they once were. How many people don't even know who their town Mayor is?
As well, access to information from the internet means you know exactly what this guy did, you know all his achievements already, he is elevated above his knighthood to you because you care more about his achievements than his place in society. Fair enough, and I'd agree!
Imagine instead it's 1890 and you're a foundational part of a strong british community, then as graciously as he disembarked from the train, Sir Tim Berners Lee has greeted you. A sir! My goodness, what must he have done? You don't know, all you know is they hold a very important position in the society you're also strongly part of, so you can respect that achievement. Gosh, how exciting!
in any case, I don't think GP is disregarding what the good sir has accomplished in life. the quibble seems to be with titles specifically. I think egalitarianism would be a better word to describe this position.
I think you are right about egalitarianism being part of the outlook, I think egalitarianism is part of individualism though. Everyone is as special as everyone else, so your rank in society isn't as important.
Growing up the UK, I don't think I ever had a classmate without internet connectivity at home. It would've been like not having electricity. Am I out of touch?
Also, from the article:
"But, he says, one-third of young people do not have any internet access and many more lack the quality of connection needed to work or learn from home."
Group projects were regularly done remotely on Skype after school to do homework (admittedly to my chagrin as I didn't have a Windows machine to run Office).
Is there more reliable data on this?
https://onezero.medium.com/the-web-must-work-better-for-youn...
Let’s say, and why not, that you’re a pretty girl living in a small village on a farm.
You start to dabble on Instagram and at first post photos or horses, veggies growing, campfires - you know, normal farm stuff.
A couple young farmers from the community has they eyes on you. They tout the size of their farms and how you can have beautiful children together.
But one day, accidentally, you post a photo on Instagram of yourself that’s slightly revealing, you felt a bit daring that day.
Now you got 15,000 likes. Normally you’d get maybe 2 likes for anything else.
You get a little more daring. Now you’ve posted more like the “daring” photo and in the space of a couple of months, without even noticing, you’ve gained 120,000 followers.
You fear looking at your DM. You have to turn off Instagram notifications.
You start posting on tiktok. Even more followers because, video.
In total you’re over 220,000 followers. Men contacting you every day.
Now those farm boys with the promise of marriage look pretty lame.
People start sending you money. Cash app. PayPal. Venmo.
Secretly, you’re making more money than your parents.
Another girl online mentioned lonely-fans. You’re considering it...
Current social media has destroyed normal relationships. Destroyed remote communities.
It’s 10,000x worse than any “digital divide”.
There’s good or bad in everything - but this is one of the indisputably bad things that has happened to the world in the last 10 years.
She now has the option to leave a dead end rural lifestyle is she chooses. And if she's into the dead end rural life (insert whatever dumb american tropes we have that idealize wasteful rural modes of living), she won't find rich, high flying city guys very appealing and it's all a wash. Or maybe she wants to move to a different dead end rural community with a better match than the random farmer she happened to be born next to. Now she can do that on farmers only.
You could say some good and some bad (and of course very bad for the random farmer whose main reproductive strategy was apparently counting on his mate not realizing he's not a catch and there are much better options), but you can't say it's only bad.
Ideally, none of these people reproduce at all since we already have plenty of humans. Hopefully the shift to digital relationships can greatly reduce our headcount in the long run. This trend seems well underway already thankfully.
Sorry, but who's growing your food?
More to the point, are you implying that it wouldn't be possible for a dead end community to grow food? If so, why? Seems like a bizarre argument but I'll bite.
On average, for now, yes. Not across the entire national population, though. We're just selecting for the sorts of people who thrive (reproductively/evolutionarily speaking) in the modern high competition/low scarcity environment. Because this environment is very different from the environment, say, 200 years ago, people that are more fit to the current environment are relatively rare now- which is why you see trends pointing towards overall population decline- but those small subgroups are there, quietly reproducing at >2.1 children per woman. As such, over time, they'll come to make up the majority of the population, as the relatively non-competitive phenotypes numerically stagnate or dwindle.
Ironically, the prediliction to be convinced of viewpoints like your own (given things like personality and political tendency have a significant hereditary component) is one of the things likely to be selected against!
The future is a dwindling relative population of midwit liberals, lots of live-fast die-young r-selection chads, and one 150 IQ guy who made a billion clones of himself.
Hmmmm...
Now let’s extrapolate that to every country. Because that’s what social media did.
That example was taken from outside the United States. It’s only worse inside North America now.
Are you one of those people who get super scared when women are too independent or make more money than you?
This is an infrastructure issue where people don't have internet access.