The Internet. Yes I believe it is both. I am not gonna rant and rave above why it arguably is…connecting the world, breaking all geographical boundaries, the source of all information blah blah yackity schmackity! you know all that that. I am gonna tell you why it’s the world’s worst invention.

Have you noticed over the last 10 years or so since the net really took but in general over the last 50 years of history, that fundamental discoveries, especially those in science, art and music have kind of dried up? Now I do not mean that great works and theories are not occuring, what I am referring to is a general loss in our generations ability to solve fundamental questions? Perhaps it’s just me but where have people of the order of magnitude of Einstein, Mozart and Da Vinci gone? Is it that core understandings of the universe have reached a point where there is little left to discover or that art and music is now something that is so well understood that the universe no longer needs priceless works anymore? Somehow I doubt that concept, instead I argue that the ease of information gathering and transfer, coupled with our generations desire to simply see what Google or Wikipedia says about a topic, has rendered us somewhat limited in our problem solving abilities and in general, quite uninterested in really understanding the core of any issue…

I have noticed this very specifically in my day-to-day as a software developer and project manager. As time goes on, each set of new graduates seem to have less and less ability to problem solve without being hand-held. Now obviously I cannot say for sure what is going on, but I have a suspicion, that as children are being introduced to the pc and Internet at an earier and earlier age, their desire to discover with some manual effort and their ability to really understand something is going down the toilet. I mean in the days of the great scientists, one couldn’t just go to google, type something and get back 1.345 million results. No no, one had to figure that shit out, how ever long it took because there simply wasn’t another way….

Now don’t send me examples of all the Noble prize winners over the last 50 years claiming that more has been discovered in the last 50 years than the last 500 years…you need to look at the quality and magnitude for changing life, of that discovery.

The Internet has made us take everything for granted, everything is easy, everything is about the next big thing, quantity without any quality. I mean take twitter for an example, seriously what’s the point?? It’s just facebook statuses which facebook was already doing well so why is facebook as my friend put it “No longer relevant”? To my mind, we are becoming a society where we are losing respect for the basics of life and I blame the Internet.

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