Until the age of 33, my morning routine did not involve waking up and immediately checking a handful of news sites to see what had happened to the world while I was asleep.
That seems incredible now, and incredible too that the internet has insinuated itself into the very warp and weft of my life in less than half a decade. Oh sure, for the 10 years before that I jumped online every day, but it was always a distinct activity: go to room with computer, start computer, start browser, go online. I grabbed an iPhone 3G in 2009 (just two months before the 3GS came out damnit), but didn’t really use it as a reading device very much - Safari was still too limited and the display too small.
Flip ahead seven years and now I’m actively choosing to check info on my Note7 rather than walk over to the PC. The internet is always with me, in my hip pocket, and at times I’m given to wonder whether all the convenience it gives us comes at the expense of all the social evolution we’ve achieved over the last 50 years.
Because the social side of the net - beyond your own particular Facebook or STEEM group of people you actually know - really does seem to be relentlessly poisonous and negative. From rude comments on every single news story about anything, to revolting threats of sexual violence against women, to the barely-secret exchange of child pornography via the so-called dark web - the deeper you probe, the worse it seems to get.
Our feature on the dark web shows exactly what kinds of terrible things people are using the internet for. Smartphones have ushered in an age of safe, anonymous communication but it’s rare that we hear a positive story about this. Yes, there was the Arab Spring, but on the flip side we’ve had teenagers using Blackberry’s anonymous messaging system to co-ordinate riots in the UK in 2011, terrorists using cellphones to detonate IEDs, female celebrities finding nude pictures uploaded to public servers, and media hacking the phones of murder victims for a juicy story. Actually, the Arab Spring turned out pretty bad in the long run too.
It’s also hard to not come to the conclusion that there are hundreds of thousands - maybe even millions - of people out there using the web to mount a concerted attack on women. And yes, I mean women in a general sense. Everything about women, a big chunk of society seems to hate, and loves to rant and rave about it online.
Then there’s cyberbullying. It’s now that much harder for a bullying victim to get a break outside school - the bullying just switches to online after hours, and asking a teenager to give up social media is borderline abuse, these days.
And yet, if you step away from the phone or the PC and go out into your local community, attend a daggy weekend market or a school concert, you’ll find a whole bunch of, well, normal people. Unassuming people who look out for each other in the community and volunteer in all sorts of ways and generally keep society running smoothly by, well, not being a bunch of dicks.
Yes, there’s usually a neighbour from hell, if not on your street then on the street over. And it’s the way these people, this antisocial minority, can use the web to amplify and distil their counter-productive attitude that makes the whole world seem like it’s only one blog post from spontaneous combustion.