Fire Worship: The Internet and Social Interaction Today

The Internet, like Vannevar Bush’s idea in "As We May Think" to create the Memex machine, has made access to mankind’s knowledge easier and very convenient. There are some downsides to this very powerful resource that has become available to most people. Bush had an idea to make a machine that looked like a desk, but stored volumes of knowledge on microfilm that could be accessed by whomever used the desk. The Memex was never created, though in later years, the Internet would become the working mechanism that provides the personal access to knowledge that Bush wanted from the Memex.

The Internet is an immense resource of knowledge and other things for people to spend time exploring what is out there. It makes getting the answer to a question like “what is heart disease?” very easy to acquire. Although the Internet has made information access easy, I think it is inhibiting our social skills in daily situations, eventually to the point where people will not communicate in print hardly ever and some will have a hard time conversing with someone in person because they are used to communication and conversation in e-mails, texts and blogs on the Internet.

Blogging on the Internet today has enabled people to speak their minds on whatever they want and anybody can read it. It is good in a way because people are able to blog whenever, wherever, and on whatever they want. Although your blog is up for everyone to see, most blogs are hardly read by many people. Instead of writing letters to the editor in the local newspaper, people complain online, where less people will read it. People become addicted to celebrity blogs reading about other people’s lives, and it’s a little sickening. It’s even sicker that blogging has become the primary resource for political mud-slinging in today’s Presidential election campaign. It has literally become a blog war between the two candidate’s blogs and how many bad details their advisors can post about the other candidate. As soon as something bad is said, the other party condemns the candidate for such a low blow and then ten seconds later, posts something just as bad. Blog wars are getting out of control along with people’s addictions to the Internet and spending all their time exploring it.

Many people would disagree and say it isn’t a bad thing to use the Internet all the time for everything, after all, it is a resource. But just like oil is a resource, it is being mismanaged and leading to problems in society. Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote in “Fire Worship” about the new and extremely efficient wood-burning stove that cuts down on the amount of wood used. In his time before the woodstove, the family would gather around the fireplace to stay warm and because of this closeness, the family would bond and talk and share in the warm light of a fire. Hawthorne sees a trend emerge with the woodstove as they can be placed in multiple rooms, families no longer gather around the fire. He says “In one way or another, here and there, and all around us, the inventions of mankind are fast blotting the picturesque, the poetic, and the beautiful out of human life.” The same can be said for the invention of the Internet. People no longer go the local library to do their research for projects and papers. Instead they sit at home and look it up online because most of what they need is online anyway. And like the loss of interaction due to the wood stove, people do not sit and talk over coffee as much anymore; they sit at home and e-mail back and forth their views and standpoints on the issues at hand.

In my opinion, texting is useful to ask a simple question when you can’t talk, like if you are at work. But I hate it when somebody sends me a text to ask me a question that has a complicated answer like “When can we get together to do this project?” There is no “yes” or “no” answer to the question and it would take many texts back and forth to figure out when you can meet up. When instead of using all that time to type out messages, you could have just called and asked me and the conversation would be over in a couple minutes. I feel like people are so used to using these new forms of communication through new technology, that they have forgotten how to communicate verbally. It’s almost as if the person is scared of talking to somebody on the phone.

When talking of the loss of conversation, Hawthorne says that “The easy gossip--the merry, yet unambitious jest--the life-long, practical discussion of real matters in a casual way--the soul of truth, which is so often incarnated in a simple fireside word--will disappear from Earth. Conversation will contract the air of debate, and all moral intercourse be chilled with a fatal frost.” I think that what Hawthorne saw in the negative effects of the invention of the wood stove and its effect on social interaction can be applied to the invention of the Internet and subsequent forms of electronic communication, as negative effects on society’s ability to interact in social situations today.

My History with Computers and the Internet

The first memory I have of using a computer goes back to elementary school. I guess I was in kindergarten or first grade, but my mom would take my brother and me to the library to get books and we would always play games on the computers they had there. I don’t remember what the names of the games were, but I do remember the huge floppy disks that we used in the really old Apple computers that were used back then.

Later in elementary school, I remember using computers in the classroom to play some of the best games ever made: Oregon Trail and Tetris. Everyone in my class always wanted to play. We thought computers were so cool! I’m sure there was another reason for the computers in the classroom, for some school related purpose, but I can’t remember because all we cared about as kids were the games and fun stuff we could do with the computers. Outside of school, I remember having a computer at home that only had some kind of word processor and some games that we used to play a lot.

The first time I remember using the Internet was when I got to middle school. Around sixth or seventh grade, I remember we got Internet at my house and a new computer that might have been a Dell because that was back when Dell was popular and they had the “Dude, you gotta get a Dell” guy in their commercials. We had the AOL service provider because that was also what everybody was using at the time and it was also dial-up which was horrible. My friends from school and I started to instant message each other when we were not at school since that was a new thing too. The first computer class I had to take in school was in eighth grade as part of the state’s end-of-grade testing and to test our proficiency before going to high school. We had to learn about all the Microsoft Office software and programs like Word, PowerPoint and Excel and we also had to practice typing using a typing program.

In high school, we switched to high speed internet when we moved into our new house my freshman year. I remember mp3 players becoming popular and so my brother downloaded Napster and we began downloading music for our mp3 player that would hold like 50 songs. All throughout high school we were using the Internet on a daily basis for school work and personal use. Napster got in trouble for copyright issues and so we had to stop using it, but then my brother just downloaded Limewire instead. He also found eBaum’s world which was the start of using the internet for videos and pictures and other stupid, funny things before there was YouTube. My dad got the first laptop (a Dell Inspiron) we ever had when he thought he was starting a business and never did, so when I went to college, I used that until last Christmas when I got a new Dell Inspiron because the old one became a piece of crap.

It’s pretty amazing to look back at the progression from Apple’s and floppy disks to laptops and high speed internet and the 10-12 years that it all happened while I was in school. Everything changed so fast and was 10 times better every time they came up with something new. It was hard to stay up to date with the speed that technology was improving at and it is still changing today.