The UK Independent is running a series of four essays this week to mark the first decade of the 21st century. The second essay this week was titled Has the Internet Brought us Together or Driven Us Apart (8 December 2009). It’s a good reflective piece by Johann Hari. The following extracts give a flavour of why the full essay is worth reading.
… if all this social networking is actually a way of keeping people at a distance – a way of having a “friend” but not having any of the commitments and duties of friendship. When the sci-fi novelist William Gibson first put forward the notion of “cyberspace”, he described it as a “consensual hallucination”, where we pretend we are together, when in reality we are alone.
What if somebody could do the same everywhere and bring the internet down worldwide? … Would we be relieved to be suddenly freed from the endless pings of pointless emails? Would we find our concentration spans mysteriously widening again? Would we start to look at the people around us with a clear gaze, rather than at a torrent of status updates? Would we see the newspaper and record industries rise again, as people had to pay for their goods once more? Maybe …
