How much time do we spend on the Internet. How bad is a computer. As our memory degrades, relationships with loved ones and health status worsen … Listen, so all the troubles are from the Internet. Or maybe we’re exaggerating?
Not a day goes by without hearing about computerization as almost the main evil of today’s life. Internet addiction has not yet been introduced into a number of medical diagnoses, but is gradually approaching that, so, you see, it will continue a number of alcohol, drug, gambling addiction. A child in front of a computer is perceived as a horror-horror-horror of beating the mind and other similar sad outcomes of the decline of culture burning on screens and monitors. Live human communication seems to be dying under the poisonous radiation of gadgets. “War and Peace” in ten-line SMS format is about to replace the paper book. Word and calculator make the younger generations illiterate idiots. Life rolls into network turmoil …
All and sundry write about it, and not by hand they write and not on typewriters, fingers stained with carbon paper beat off, but caressing the keys of a computer. And they are sent to the editors not in an envelope, but by e-mail. And they publish more and more on the same Internet. And in pauses, they don’t run to the mailbox for newspapers, but look through the news on the same Internet, watch 18+ videos and do everything. It is, of course, sweet to feel like the only warrior on the bastions of culture, but …
Vaguely, but I remember how, at the age of 4-5, I put letters on the floor from a stock of splintered splinters for kindling the stove. I clearly remember my respectful surprise at the age of 47 in front of the four-year-old daughter of an American friend, who was famously clicking keys on a computer I had never seen before – she was learning French. And after a quarter of a century – the meaningful joy of an eight-month-old granddaughter in front of the iPad screen with the Baby Einstein program loaded into it. And happy for them. Recently, in Odessa, on Cathedral Square, I saw a library created by MTS: several pedestals depicting bookshelves, where you can download your favorite books from a huge catalog to your gadget for free. Even knowing superficially the electronic means of schooling, I cannot but envy today’s children. Wherever I am, I can find myself in a good scientific electronic library.
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So where and why is the suspiciously wary and biased accusatory attitude towards computerization and the Internet?
I think, first of all, it is a reaction to novelty. Computerization came to Russia late and is developing too fast not to arouse the wariness that typography used to arouse. It seems that a person can fully develop in the same environment in which we ourselves developed. At the same time, our achievements in development, as a rule, are exaggerated, and children’s are underestimated. Adults of previous generations generally lose to children in computer skills. At the age of 4–5, a child who is not yet able to read and write knows how to use a search engine and type addresses in it in Latin, and a 50–60-year-old person has to learn this for more than one day. And if I can’t run at the speed of a child, then maybe slow him down?
About 20% of Internet users in Russia note that they spend too much time on it to the detriment of other things. But maybe it’s better on the Internet than in the front door or behind garages with a bottle for three? And is there anything in the world that cannot be abused? What is worse or more harmful to turn the Rubik’s Cube on the screen than in your hands?
They say that the Internet is a breeding ground for pornography and is therefore dangerous. But porn appeared much earlier than the Internet. And the child-teenager interest in sexuality used to be satisfied with peeping, digging to Maupassant hidden by parents in a wardrobe and obstetrics textbooks in stores, hastily looking at miserable porn photos pulled down from adults and eyes sticking to nakedness in pictures.
Whatever you say, there is no reason to hang all the dogs that existed long before it on computerization. And then one main question remains: why and how do I use a computer? Not what computer is so-and-so or diamond-chocolate, but how and for what I use it. He, like most of the achievements of civilization, is only what I make of him for myself. Will I tame him or will he tame me?