{"id":10419,"date":"2019-12-22T14:38:00","date_gmt":"2019-12-22T21:38:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=10419"},"modified":"2019-12-30T14:42:50","modified_gmt":"2019-12-30T21:42:50","slug":"is-the-internet-bad","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2019\/12\/22\/is-the-internet-bad\/","title":{"rendered":"Is The Internet Bad?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

from BUZZFEED<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

by Joseph Bernstein<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"\/
The cover of the July 1997 issue of Wired \/ Conde Nast<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

In April 1997<\/strong>, Wired magazine published a feature<\/a> with the grand and regrettable<\/a> title \u201cBirth of a Digital Nation.\u201d It was a good time to make sweeping, sunny pronouncements about the future of the United States and technology. The US stood alone astride the globe. Its stock market was booming. Microsoft was about to become the world\u2019s most valuable company, a first for a tech firm. A computer built by IBM was about to beat the world chess champion at his own game.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And yet, the journalist Jon Katz argued, the country was on the verge of something even greater than prosperity and progress \u2014 something that would change the course of world history. Led by the Digital Nation, \u201ca new social class\u201d of \u201cyoung, educated, affluent\u201d urbanites whose \u201cbusiness, social and cultural lives increasingly revolve around\u201d the internet, a revolution was at hand, which would produce unprecedented levels of civic engagement and freedom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The tools of this revolution were facts, with which the Digital Nation was obsessed, and with which they would destroy \u2014 or at least neuter \u2014 partisan politics, which were boring and suspicious.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI saw \u2026 the formation of a new postpolitical philosophy,\u201d Katz wrote. \u201cThis nascent ideology, fuzzy and difficult to define, suggests a blend of some of the best values rescued from the tired old dogmas \u2014 the humanism of liberalism, the economic opportunity of conservatism, plus a strong sense of personal responsibility and a passion for freedom.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Comparing the coming changes to the Enlightenment, Katz lauded an \u201cinteractivity\u201d that \u201ccould bring a new kind of community, new ways of holding political conversations\u201d \u2014 \u201ca media and political culture in which people could amass factual material, voice their perspectives, confront other points of view, and discuss issues in a rational way.\u201d Such a sensible, iterative American public life contained, Katz wrote, \u201cthe \u2026 tantalizing \u2026 possibility that technology could fuse with politics to create a more civil society.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such arguments, that a rational tech vanguard would spark an emancipatory cycle of national participation, were common at the time….<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[ click to continue reading at BUZZFEED<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

from BUZZFEED Alienated, Alone And Angry: What The Digital Revolution Really Did To Us We were promised community, civics, and convenience. Instead, we found ourselves dislocated, distrustful, and disengaged. by Joseph Bernstein In April 1997, Wired magazine published a feature with the grand and regrettable title \u201cBirth of a Digital Nation.\u201d It was a good time to make sweeping, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10419","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-art"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10419","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10419"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10419\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}