A Culture Taken Over By The World Wide Web

Hey there all you bloggers,

As I am writing this blog, I’m using the Internet. Once I have completed posting the blog I will mostly go on Facebook or MSN and immediately be connected to several other people who are using it as well. It seems as though our generation has started a dependency of the World Wide Web. We cannot seem to go a day without turning it on - or at least I know I can’t. The Internet has become our way of communicating anything to anyone. It’s like a drug for most people - we need are daily fix.

In Neil Postman’s The Humanism of Media Ecology, he describes the principle of what media ecology is. Postman describes it through the word medium, “A technology within which a culture grows.” (Postman, 1) The Internet is the technology in which our culture grows. Everything you would ever want to know can be found through a search engine, such as Google or Yahoo and everything new we find seems to be more often than not, put onto the Internet. Our culture is growing right at our fingertips. There is so much information coming on to the Internet each and every day. The question is when is it too much? Neil Postman stated that “My own answer question concerning access to information is that, at least for now, the speed, volume, and variety available information serve as a distraction and a moral deficit; we are deluded into thinking that the serious social problems of our time would be solved if only we had more information, and still more information.” (Postman, 5) The Internet gives us access to the information in such an overwhelming state that sometimes it can be hard to determine what to listen to. It is so quick to access this information that it allows us to forget to take time and evaluate everything.

To our generation it seems as though this is the future. Pretty soon everything will be done on the Internet. Postman explains that “After all, we can listen to music alone, watch television alone, and watch videos alone. And now with the aid of computers, we can shop at home, we will be voting at home, and going to college at home-...” (Postman, 4) It seems as though our culture we will be dependent on this sole technology. But for how long? Culture changes with time; at one point in time we use to be dependent on books for knowledge and the development of ourselves, now we rely on the Internet. We can’t with certainty say that computers and the Internet will be there tomorrow because cultures are always changing. These technologies only shape our cultures for what is in the future, what impacts they have now reflect what the culture could become.

For people looking to rely less on the Internet, it almost seems impossible. From school to work, the Internet has become an easy tool for professors and co-workers to communicate with each other. It allows what needs to be said and in manner that requires less interaction with verbal communication. The Internet is taking away from the human interactions; we have the ability to be connected to thousands of people through instant messaging and Facebook but in the end we are all alone. We aren’t talking with emotions anymore; we are talking in one tone and whatever you type is left for the reader to interpret.

What media ecology would tell us is to watch what we are doing with the Internet? It is trying to determine how it affects us and why. If we take the time to access this technology, like we would getting to know a stranger - the technology would take less of ourselves and in return not have such a negative effect on us as humans. Media ecology wants us to see the whole picture, not just the positive side. Technology will inevitably take over certain parts of our lives but what we need to ask is how much we will allow it to take over. We decide how to spend our time.

Till the next time,

Sarah Young

Works Cited

Postman, Neil. "The Humanism of Media Ecology." 16jun2000 23 Sep 2008 <http://www.media-ecology.org/publications/MEA_proceedings/v1/humanism_of_media_ecology.html>.