The Tools of The Internet

Ever since a computer scientist named Tim Berners-Lee in 1990 created the world wide web, the internet has been advancing.  Due to Mr.Berners-Lee doing this the internet has allowed us to make meaning and pursue purpose.  From online shopping to online petitions the internet provides a tool to allow the whole world to come together as one.  Jennifer Earl from the University of California, Santa Barbara in her article “Pursuing Social Change” talks about how the internet is able to be used as a tool to hold petitions to help better the world. In Bill Wasik’s “ My Crowd Experiment:The Mob Project” used the internet to organize flash mobs.  And Richard Restak’s “Attention Deficit:The Brain Syndrome of Our Era”.  The internet provides many tools that allows the whole world make meaning and pursue purpose.

Being able to change something in your community is something special.  What if you can change that problem that you have in your community and every other community in the entire world?  The internet allows people around the world to make large scale changes even when it is just them.  That is where Jennifer Earl comes in from the University of California, Santa Barbara.  In her article “Pursuing Social Change Online, The Use of Four Protest Tactics on the Internet”, she talks about online petitions.  Earl states, “One well-known provider of online petitions is moveon.org, which actually began with an online petition opposing the impeachment of Bill Clinton in 1998 that 500,000 people ultimately signed” (Earl 2).”  This is one very big petition that happened.  Ultimately the petition didn’t work but 500,000 people voiced their opinions.  That is a lot of people that wanted to change something that happened in the world.  Petitions can be any size and it can be about anything.  Petitions can be about anything you want it to be.  You can start a petition about anything that you want to change in the world.   The internet allows us now to try and get the whole country together, and end something or begin something.  This is a very useful tool that the internet provides us and I think it could be one of the best uses of the internet.  She also talks about another useful thing that the internet provides us similar to petitioning.  It is called boycotting.   Boycotting is when someone refuses to buy a good from a certain company in protest.   Earl says, “A typical site hosting a boycott would include online stores (e.g., amazon.com) or offline companies (e.g., Coca-Cola)– and why (e.g., poor environmental records, poor labor practices).” (Earl 2)  Maybe somebody learned about let’s say Coca-Cola not treating their workers right and they have poor work conditions someone can talk about this on one of these websites and they can start a movement.  The people that are trying to boycott Coca-Cola could truly start a big movement against Coca-Cola.  Many people like coke and they probably think that the people that are producing their drink are being treated fairly, but they really aren’t.  This could be a huge social movement.  Having this going on would make Coca-Cola lose tons of money over something stupid.  This would force the company to invest money into making the conditions more acceptable for the workers and treat their workers better.  This is all thanks to the internet.  The internet allows someone, who is in Maine, to tell someone that lives in Texas about this on one of these sites on the internet.  Then that person says that they are going to boycott the company as well.  Then he shares it with his friends and the next thing you know the whole world knows that Coca-Cola gives its workers terrible working conditions and the whole world boycotts them.

Communication through text messages and emails are tools that you wouldn’t be able to use without the internet.  In the world today the internet is all over the place.  In Bill Wasik’s “My Crowd Experiment:The Mob Project” he experiments with using the internet as a tool.  “I wanted to use e-mail to get people to come to some sort of show, where something surprising would happen, perhaps involving a fight; or an entire fake arts scene, maybe, some tight-knit band of fictitious young artists and writers who all lived together in a loft, and we would reel in journalists and would-be admirers eager to congratulate themselves for having discovered the next best thing” (Wasik 475).  What Bill is doing here is using the internet as a tool to get people to come together, this is also a great use of the internet as a tool.  It allows you to communicate with others even when you aren’t with that person.  You can send text messages and do all these great things now with the internet.  When Wasik emailed all these people he didn’t believe that he would have so many people show up for this flash mob.  But, that is the power of the internet.  The internet is able to help the people come together and do things together.  

In the world that we live in today many adults say that the internet is distracting the millennial generation more than it is being used as a tool to learn.  These adults aren’t wrong.  There are so many distractions with the internet now, such as crawlers that are at the bottom of the tv screen when you are watching the news.  In Richard Restak’s “Attention Deficit:The Brain Syndrome of Our Era”, Restak says, “Despite my best efforts to concentrate on Laura Bush’s words, I kept looking down at the crawler to find out what else might be happening that was perhaps even more interesting.  As a result, at several points I lost the thread of the conversation between the First Lady and the interviewer.  Usually, I missed the question and was therefore forced to remain in the dark during the first sentence or so of her response.”   If the millennial generation was able to focus on the crawlers like Restak did the internet could be used as a huge tool.  By using the internet they can stop being distracted by the outside world and start doing work.  The millennials can put their headphones in and not her anything of the outside world.  When Restak did that he said that he was trying to find something more interesting.  So if Restak did that many other people did that as well.  Being distracted by the crawler could be a very good thing.  The reason why it would be good is because a millennial could find something that they believe to be interesting and they would look into it more.  This helps the millennial learn more about a certain thing whether it be about a new medicine that just came out or a new virus that pops up.  If the millennial reads about this new thing that happened maybe they are going to want to go into the medical field and try to find a medicine for this new virus.  

As technology keeps advancing the advantages of using the internet as a tool to make meaning and to pursue purpose.  From being able to change something in your community to changing something the whole world will benefit from the tools that the internet provides us as a society is vast.  Also, being able to communicate with someone across the United States and telling them to come to a certain location because there will be a flash mob is another tool that the internet provides us with.