Jacob LaFlamme

Professor Emerson

November 20, 2017

English 110-C

Meaning and Purpose on the Internet

Danger and opportunity are two words that are seemingly at odds with each other. However, the Information Age is a rare time wherein these words can co-exist. The invention of the internet and mobile technologies has created multiple platforms for sharing information, boosting the rate of discovery across all disciplines and spreading globalization. At the same time, internet usage is responsible for facilitating the proliferation of problematic behaviors in users, including addiction, spread of hateful rhetoric, and misinformation. Nevertheless, the internet is a tool of purpose and meaning due to its ability to bring groups together, enhance social well-being, foster innovation and provide tools to limit abuse. This paper seeks to display these elements in order to show that the internet is a tool for meaning and purpose.

The internet as a tool of purpose and meaning has nurtured and expanded social well-being. Humans are social animals, and the advent of the internet has facilitated the invention of massively successful social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest among others. These have all offered alternatives for travelling to meet other people, allowing users to connect and share common interests with their peers from across the globe. Indeed, the internet has widened the social reach of people by diminishing the effects of geographical and time boundaries. In 2003, Bill Wasik envisioned a social experiment, confessing that it began because he was, “bored and disposed toward acts of social-scientific inquiry,” (Wasik 57). Wasik began by surmising that the New York social scene had become about being ‘there’ rather than ‘knowing why’, and he wanted to prove this hypothesis through such an invitation.

This ‘scenesterism’ as it is known is, “the appeal of concerts and plays and readings and gallery shows deriving less from the work itself than from the social opportunities the work might engender,” (58). The structure of the experiment became commonly known as a flash mob. Writing about this experiment in his 2006 essay, “My Crowd, or Phase 5: A report from the inventor of the flash mob,” Wasik reasoned that the mob, “was all about the herd instinct… about the desire not to be left out of the latest fad,” (58) rather than any other greater purpose of belonging, communicating, and connecting.

Yet, his experiment confirmed (maybe paradoxically relative to Wasik’s views) the centrality of digital media, aided by the internet, in fostering creativity, togetherness, and providing a new form of expression with its own capability of generating meaning and purpose. The flash mobs created by Wasik’s experiment began popping up everywhere, often functioning to champion good and common purposes. Ireland, for example, uses the flash mob as a means of coordinating its national volunteer day. The Make-A-Wish Foundation organized a flash mob in San Francisco to surprise a boy with a life-threatening medical condition. While these ‘flash mobs’ were created on short notice and lasted for only moments at a time, being able bring strangers together into a community with collective awareness and a meaningful and worthwhile purpose infers a capacity to outweigh any other gatherings resulting from bored or malicious feelings. Last year, a grandmother from Hawaii posted an idea to march for women’s rights on Facebook. Two months later, 3.3 million individuals marched peacefully on every continent from Hawaii to Antarctica (Waddell, 3).  This march, now popularly known as the Women’s March on Washington, is a testament to the usefulness of internet-related technologies for creating meaning and serving useful, benevolent purposes.

The internet has fostered innovation at scales never seen before because of its ability to not only reduce the time it takes to share information, but also its unprecedented capacity for bringing people with different skills and ideas together, thereby facilitating collaboration. As an infrastructure consisting of interconnected computer-enabled devices across the globe, the internet allows users to search for, generate, archive, and share information. New York Times staff writer Sam Anderson, in his essay, “In Defense of Distraction”, identifies one of the most important ways the internet fosters innovation: by creating connection. Einstein, he writes, had linked, “things that had been previously unlinked – Newtonian gravity and particle physics” (Anderson 14). While this link is the grandest of scale, consider that in 2011, online gamers’ pooled data to discover how a virus protein linked to HIV was folded – something that biochemists had spent 15 years trying to accomplish to no avail (CBC News). The discovery resulted from biochemists reaching out to online communities. Different cultures (biochemists and gamers) with different experiences in this instance communicated with each other through the internet and digital media, which forged an opportunity to advance preventative and even curative procedures for HIV. The internet enables connections and linkages that do indeed hold meaning and purpose.

Despite such evident advantages, the internet is nevertheless a double-edged sword. Many of its critics point to its tendency to create distraction, while internet content developers find ways of encouraging and capitalizing on compulsive behavior and human psychology. The problem is particularly rampant on social media platforms where individuals are addicted to frequently visiting their social pages to the extent that it affects their normal lives. The depletion of the willpower of internet users in determining accessibility and usefulness of the content is a broad underside of the internet. Michael Schulson, producer of The Cubit, an online division of Religion Dispatches magazine covering science, religion, technology, and ethics, discusses the irony of the brilliant minds that create digital tools designed solely for compulsion rather than purpose. In his essay, “User Behaviour” Schulson asks the question, “Should the net be regulated like drugs or casinos?” (Schulson 1). While I disagree – the internet should not be regulated – internet developers have created tools solely for the purpose of both encouraging and capitalizing on compulsive behavior. Schulson discusses how Facebook, for example, uses variable reward triggers parallel to BF Skinner’s psychological research with pigeons that showed the random interval of reward was the most addictive. These software companies have, “staked their futures on methods to cultivate habits in users to win as much of that attention as possible” (3). This system of triggers and addiction is not aligned with the internet as a useful and purposeful tool. Even so, in his essay regarding willpower and self-control on the internet, Schulson identifies that while the internet developers and companies create these issues, these same developers are looking to solve them by creating solutions to these problems.

Internet developers and companies have begun building and providing tools to limit abuse and promote attentiveness. Tristan Harris is an ethical design proponent at Google, developer, and co-founder of the non-profit company, Time Well Spent. Time Well Spent asks, “How can design fix it?” in respect to redesigning technology and ideas to place the best interests of users first. Harris shares that, although a user might try to exercise willpower and self-control, major tech companies, “have 100 of the smartest statisticians and computer scientists, who went to top schools, whose job it is to break your willpower.” (Schulson 3) Such designed ‘habits’ that have been purposefully induced by developers can also create distraction on a disproportionate scale. Sam Anderson points out regarding the power of the internet, “I am not ready to blame my restless attention entirely on a faulty willpower.” (Anderson 8) Anderson’s assessment is valid, and solutions are emerging. Like Harris, many of those ‘smartest statisticians and computer scientists’ Schulson referred to have decided to use their proficiency to provide tools for purpose and meaning. It is their efforts that are combatting the tide and helping users exercise control how they utilize the internet, cultivate better user habits, and obtain reliable sources of information. Harris and his ethical colleagues have begun to develop technologies for helping people to exercise such control.  Saent, for example, is a new productivity tool that blocks distraction and tracks focused worktime to increase beneficial behaviors of the user. Freedom, another tool, allows users to easily shut down sites. These are just two of many tools that have been developed to allow the user control over how they go about the internet.  Harris and his colleagues continue educating and developing to allow users more flexibility with their internet use, which in turn, will enhance purpose and meaning that each person can draw from and create on the internet.

In conclusion, the advantages of the internet as a tool for meaningful and useful purposes are many. The internet fosters innovation by reducing the time for dissemination of information and diminishing geographical boundaries. The diminishing effects subsequently lead to more social well-being among individuals because they can use social medial platforms to connect and remain connected. These benefits lead to increased linkages and new linkages where there had not been one before. The examples of purpose and meaning are boundless; community awareness, peaceful protest, and HIV research, are all good examples.  With these opportunities there are realities that can represent dangers the use of this new technology, such as addiction and distraction. Fortunately, measures to counteract these dangers are feasible and have already begun working for users. As we approach the 50-year anniversary of the internet (2019), perhaps another fundamental change will be one of widely available ethical tools for tracking and gathering information in a way that recognizes the unscrupulous that comes with the good. One can imagine how things might change if technology companies held themselves responsible for representing the public’s interests rather than exclusively pursuing a capitalist bottom line.

 

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Works Cited

Anderson, S. (2009, May 17). In Defense of Distraction. New York Magazine. Retrieved from http://nymag.com/news/features/56793/

CBC News. (2011, September 19). Gamers’ discovery could generate anti-HIV drugs. CBC News. Retrieved from http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/gamers-discovery-could-generate-anti-hiv-drugs-1.1092262

Schulson, M. (2015, November 24). User behaviour: should addictive websites be subject to regulation? Aeon. Retrieved from https://aeon.co/essays/if-the-internet-is-addictive-why-don-t-we-regulate-it

Waddell, K. (2017, January 23). The Exhausting Work of Tallying America’s Largest Protest. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/01/womens-march-protest-count/514166/

Wasik, Bill. “My crowd: or, phase 5: a report from the inventor of the flash mob.” Harpers Magazine, 1 Mar. 2006, pp. 56–66.