Is the internet a good or bad thing?

[jeff oakley]

I love going on this and other boards but just lately I find myself wondering if the good is slowly being lost to the trolls and those with an axe to grind with various items.

Take speeding, even on PH the board has now got lots of members who will shout down any person who dares to suggest that reducing limits is not the answer to everything.

Same with Global warming, fox hunting, eating meat. Any one who appears to be against the protest groups and suddenly all hell breaks lose.

A distinguished lady dared to suggest that poor people do not know how to budget and cook for themselves, and the trolls are out.

 

What these groups have done is to harness the power of the herd mentality. They are very well organised, ruthless in the pursuit of their victims, posting home addresses, to try to get their way.

They are the new lynch mob, probably not willing to do anything to get them away from the couch, but they can reek havoc with people with the press of a button, baying for a victim to bring down, regardless of worth or facts.

 

We have lost the war of words on reduction of speed limits from reasonable to ridiculous as councils are lobbied relentlessly by these people. Politicians now take the views of Twattwer to make policy and try to be popular and down with the kids, instead of doing what is needed.

Use a word like "slope" and one complaint becomes an avalanche of "being offended professional" joining in.

Is this what Alan Turin invented the computer for? 

 

I find it increasingly annoying that a handful of ill informed people can hijack a thing that is a marvel and reduce it to the bear pit of modern times. Where certain groups can broadcast the beheading of a man who only went to deliver aid and the internet providers seem unwilling to or unable to control it.

 

You cannot put the genie back in the bottle but how do we ignore it?

 

I know it is a bit of a rant, but it does affect us, although we select members and do control pretty well the content, but our hobby, motoring related, is under attack from so many angles. Scott has to be careful that no comments made on here are in anyway racist or subject to a law suite, but much of the internet is now the wild west and the sad thing is that gullible people believe every word that some spout.

 

Anybody got any views or am I paranoid and worrying too much?

[Quinten]

It's the internet, you have a choice to participate, a choice to read, and a choice to ignore. Do you feel the same with the plethora of magazines/newspapers on offer in your local corner shop?

[s2rrr]

Jeffs correct in that freedom of "speech" is mistaken for freedom of the written word and the ability for people with an axe to grind to do so in quite damaging ways. Our society is being reshaped by the tinterweb savvy and maybe in not the way we "normal" people agree with. We have Facebook and other sites with people spilling there guts in a public domain making the stealing or obtaining of readily available information there for all to see and with a little creativity major damage can be done. Not good. Not a huge fan of state control but some basic rules need to be addressed to protect people from themselves. Other than that its a great tool but has the ability to provide information which may or may not be factual. As for making friends on certain web sites I do have to suppress a snigger as youngsters actually believe they are friends and the parents are happy to allow the kids to hide away for hours whilst they risk oblivion unless parental control takes back the kids lives.

 

Bob

[Lyonspride]

I've been around on the web since it was still an infant, back when people would have looked down their noses at you for mentioning it.

 

I've experienced the worst of it and i'm quite capable of defending myself.

I think people expect too much AND forget that in real life people will agree with you JUST to avoid being anti-social, to avoid confrontation, to avoid being the odd one out, it's something we learn from a VERY early age.

 

On the web, yes you get trolls and yes you get cliques on various forums, who will all side with each other just to avoid being singled out by the group. But many people also have their own opinions and do stand up for what they believe, and many people who have an opinion formed through social influence and not through fact, will find themselves getting shot down by people who really do know better.

 

It's like real life, only people won't always agree with you just for the sake of being polite.

 

And....... As for people who go splashing their lives all over the web for everyone to see, well I can't really feel any sympathy for them. Especially certain young girls who think because all their friends are overly nice and compliment them all the time, that everyone else wants to see and hear everything about them 24/7/365.... They are the worst, they have such an unreal outlook on life, protected and wrapped in cotton wool by everyone around them, they inevitably find the web unforgiving and often painfully truthful, and often they can't handle the cold hard truth of what they really are in the eyes of the rest of the world (spoilt brats who get everything their own way).

As I say, I have no sympathy at all, I blame their friends, their family and their upbringing for not preparing them well enough for the reality that everyone does not automatically have to like them.

 

The problem is not the internet, the problem is misguided individuals who have totally unrealistic lives, sheltered from reality by social compliance AND those individuals who seek social acceptance online by bullying random people (just like the school playground).

[Northwarks]

I've used the 'Internet' in various forms since the early 90s, I've seen it evolve from slow plain text message boards and email to an always on (dare I say) utility or expectation of access. Love or hate it I think its made the world a much smaller and better (as informed) place (depending on the country!!), it has shaped modern society and forced bluechip companies to change their strategy. But you know, trolls have been about since dialup was made available, you ignore them and don't let them get to you.

 

Only this Christmas we were discussing the Internet and how its changed life, in the 70's/80's (when I were a lad) if you were not lucky enough to have a row of encyclopaedias at home you had to go down the library to find things out or learn something new, now you just get a phone out and search for it ... stuff of sci-fi movies.

 

There has always been a section of society (aka the bully) who gets a kick out of inflicting [mental] pain on people, the Internet has just made it easier for faceless cowards to bully people, it's all about ignoring them and moving on.

 

 

As Quinten points out its not mandatory, you have to ignore the trolls and get on and use it as a tool, reap the many benefits and ignore the dross.

[jeff oakley]

Sorry, perhaps I have not made myself clear. I too can ignore the idiots, I am more than willing to do this face to face as I like debating. The problem is that the internet has allowed those who are unwilling to debate to hide behind a screen and opinion is now sought and policies formed as a result of what is trending. 

 

As an example Ched Evans, convicted rapist. Now the various feminist groups have decided that he should not be allowed to work again and have targeted any football club or individuals who have suggested that he should be allowed to work. The law says once he has served his sentence that he is free to continue his work, but this is not being allowed as the internet is being used. Even if he wins his judicial review and the decision is overturned, what club will offer him a contract knowing that sponsers will be harassed by huge numbers and their lives will be made a misery? If they had to by a stamp and send it would this have become an issue for people?

 

It is this sort of mob rule that he internet has fostered and allowed complete nut jobs a platform to spout hate and bigoted views with ease.

 

I love what it has done for education and entertainment, but I do feel that we have lost a huge amount for what we have gained.

[Lawrie]

I think there are two problems.

1. People who make these complaints have the spare time to do it, most of us are too busy living our lives to bother.

2. The health and safety mentality takes the view that we'd better stop it, "just in case - better to be on the safe side"

 

What did go wrong

[M444TTB]

All the internet has done is given a platform for people to prove what idiots they are. The freeing of people to express themselves should be seen as a good thing, even if it brings with it some utterly despicable behaviour. For this is what was there before. You simply didn't see it.

[Captain Colonial]

Wanna be a moderator, Jeff?   

 

Here's my free gift and tip to you all, although its something we Admins and Mods can't use.  Click on your username in the upper right corner and choose Manage Ignore Preferences.  You can then add any member whose posts you can't stand and hey presto, their comments disappear.  If you aren't shown them, you can't get wound up by them - happy days.

 

We have been working very hard to make our little corner of the Internet a happy place.  Dave Eastwood in particular has really done great work in this respect.  It's brought us a fair amount of criticism and ridicule at times, but I think the forums have never been more welcoming, friendly and respectful, and we have you all to thank for that.  

 

Its really about the fact that there is a culture in here of adult respectful discussion and debate.  Sadly, that seems to be a rarity these days.  So if we at times seem a tad heavy-handed, just think of what these forums could be like - and at one point, almost were.

[Young Pretender]

My problem with the internet is not the so called trolls that pollute various social media sites.  I think it's a little sad that people behave like this but the bigger issue is the proliferation of porn and then the more sinister stuff found on the dark web.  I think I read rather worrying stats on just how much of the total bandwidth is occupied by such activity.

 

For me the internet needs to be seriously regulated and controlled.  I give little consideration to the argument of degradation of freedom of speech or some variation of that argument.  Freedom of speech is an ideal that sounds nice but doesn't exist and cannot work.

[jeff oakley]

I am all for freedom of speech and fear censorship in many of it's form. What the internet has allowed is people to hide behind it and to manipulate the hard of thinking.

Why is UKIP doing so well? First video of Farage roasting the EU, then there are many activists who are on every newspaper comments section proclaiming only UKIP can protect you from immigrants. History cannot agree who said "if you tell a lie often enough it will become the truth" Hitler, Goering and Lenin are all said to be the one, but what is true is that the internet allows lies to be spread so quickly and effectively.

It is the dark side of the internet that concerns me, internet fraud is now a huge problem, cyber bullying is a huge problem but the very worst is the way campaigns are set up by which ever group and the public go no where to find facts, it is on the net so it must be true. Wikipedia a self regulating list of comments is now seen as being the first port of call for learning for many who cannot sort fact from fiction.

I feel overall it is 80% good and 20% bad the big but is that the 20% is still an important area to ignore. We used to ignore the loonies but now others canvas their views. Mumsnet, is now seen as a barometer of what people want which is made up of at most a few percent of the population. I have no answers just observations which I do not like.

[Northwarks]

My problem with the internet is not the so called trolls that pollute various social media sites.  I think it's a little sad that people behave like this but the bigger issue is the proliferation of porn and then the more sinister stuff found on the dark web.  I think I read rather worrying stats on just how much of the total bandwidth is occupied by such activity.

 

For me the internet needs to be seriously regulated and controlled.  I give little consideration to the argument of degradation of freedom of speech or some variation of that argument.  Freedom of speech is an ideal that sounds nice but doesn't exist and cannot work.

 

When I became a Cisco network engineer about 17 years ago the team leader said welcome to the team and said jokingly we were responsible for keeping porn flowing around the Internet, was an amusing comment but in reality he was very close to the truth with some of the networks and servers we used to manage - fact was if you banned it back then there would, we joked, be just two pages left, one would have been Webcrawler (early search engine) and the other a website telling you where to get banned stuff.

 

There has been and will always be a dark web, my personal view remains the same as it's been since the early 90s and that is you will never stop it totally, there was a concerted effort in the late 90s early 00's when we still had newsgroups (and binaries), some EU countries (Germany was the first to move if I remember) and they deleted the newsgroups for certain sinister subjects - all it did was force the sinister stuff to other non-censored locations so more people were exposed to bad stuff as it constantly moved about the 1000s of newsgroups that existed back then. So if you can't rid the world of the sinister stuff it should remain in a place where it doesn't impact the rest of the genuine users of the Internet who have no interest whatsoever. Then the techies, service providers and governments can decide how to deal long term .. 

 

Incidentally and in all seriousness if you do stumble upon some sinister stuff, the very next link you should click is this one  https://www.iwf.org.uk/report and report it.

 

Regulation and control of the Internet is not something I'm a fan of, N Korea and PRC comes to mind, I'm not daft enough to think we don't have some form of censorship now but I wouldn't be a fan of the kind of command and control that happens in some countries.

[SootySport]

There's good and bad parts of the media as a whole, newspapers, magazines, TV and radio, speakers corner at Hyde Park,  now the internet.  We are also allowed in this country the 'Off Switch'.  Some populations in the world are not even allowed to have the power of the 'Off Switch' or non participation, such as North Korea & China, maybe a couple of more countries.

 

Lobby groups persistently furthering their cause have always been around, the internet is just another Tool in their armoury. There was a long, long time ago a movement to abolish slavery and another to give women the vote. Probably most citizens of the time were sick to death with anti slavery groups and womens rights movements coming up with publicity stunts to further their  cause. Now we perfectly understand why these lobbyists started their campaigns.  In  recent decades  we have had the road safety campaigns leading to Wearing a seatbelt, Speedlimits and Anti social behaviour laws added to the statute book. Currently, the No smoking and Anti obesity groups are strutting their stuff everywhere and who's to say there will not be any laws on these subjects in the future.

 

The good  information freely available more than makes up for the bad.   That's the way I see it, If I don't like it, I won't read it.

[Lyonspride]

The powers that be, know they cannot control the internet, but they (a long with the media) seek to instil fear into everyday folk, so that they in turn support internet censorship. NO measures they ever make will stop illegal content, porn, piracy or anything... Their measures will do nothing but restrict the internet freedom of the less tech savvy individuals.

 

Everyone else will always find ways around this.

For example I could hit a button on my browser and suddenly every website I access will think I live in any one of 12 different uncensored countries, totally bypassing any content filtering that's been put in place within the UK.

If I can do that, then ask yourself who exactly is the govt trying to stop?

 

Do not allow them to control your access to information, else we will soon be back in a world where the media and the tabloid press can control the will of the nation.

 

This "Dark web", first of all it's not what your lead to believe, second of all it's BS. It's a buzzword the media has created in a bid to bite the hand that feeds them...... The Tor network, the very source of almost all the news information we receive from heavily censored nations, journalists themselves used it to get information out of the middle east (for example).

What they are seeking to do is to stop normal people getting access to the truth of what's really going on in the world, so that they can control what we think.

If you've ever been outside the UK and looked at foreign news about the UK, you'll often notice a very different political spin on it. You'll also notice that back in the UK you'll be unable to access many of those foreign news websites.

 

Giving control of the internet to a bunch of politicians is NOT the solution, I mean what happens if one buys shares in Caterham and then decided to get the word "Westfield" censored? Sounds ridiculous I know, but it happens in Russia, with censorship of entire opposing political party websites and to businesses that don't pay their backhanders.

[alexander72]

Interesting topic Geoff, i spent much of christmas riding my horse and driving my car so didnt get much time for interwebbery.....Happy New Year Mate