INTERNET ADDICTION?

It is not necessary to have any sympathy for Zuckerberg to recognize how spurious the attempt, by a number of states, to sue Meta for virtually its entire market value is, for allegedly hooking young people on sites like Facebook. Never mind that if you mention it to any young people they will tell you that “Facebook is for old people.” This is a transparent attempt by politicians and lawyers to legally steal someone else’s resources, in a way that will primarily benefit themselves. This is based on the flawed notion that Meta has effectively hooked children on their site. This is wrong, and I’m going to tell you why. 

Assume for a minute that Meta didn’t exist. People, including the young, would still flock to something else, like Tik-Tok,  with the same results. That they may have taken some steps to maintain the attention of their customer  is hardly sinister or illegal. The thing is that getting people to keep scrolling is not restricted to a few companies; it is in fact characteristic of the whole internet. Yet it would be absurd to attribute this to some evil cabal when it is in fact people doing it themselves. 

Every site wants attention from more people and will try to maintain and expand its audience. I’ve yet to watch a Podcast (apart from something on YouTube), but increasing numbers of people are watching them, and the more outrageous and sensational a program is the more likely it is to attract viewers. It is just another conscious method on the part of providers to attract an audience. The reality is that social media, and the entire web, are driven in the same way. Are we now going to assign the government the task of controlling marketing? 

The truth is that the entire Internet is what hooks people of all ages. This is clearly obvious when you see people universally and constantly engaged with their screens. It’s not just social media sites; it’s everything. Take email. What about all the scrolling through that? Yet no one was deliberately compelled to this behavior, and that is true of almost any way the Worldwide Web is utilized. 

We have a problem, but it is hardly restricted to a couple of social media sites, or young people in particular. It is everyone, everywhere all the time, and it has serious consequences for other aspects of life that are more important, based upon the time wasted and deviation from purpose. The only way to mitigate this is for people to wake up to what they are doing and exert some self-control over how their time is being used. 

As far as children go it is primarily the responsibility of parents to address this, not someone else, and certainly not the state, notwithstanding “democratic socialist” impulses. Focusing on children obscures the problem. Of course some of it may be harmful to them, but such things as social pressure would be there regardless, whether handwritten or electronic. Anyone who has gone through high school over the last hundred years can understand this. 

What is warped and missing here is that this is a universal phenomenon, affecting people of all ages. Nor is it the Internet to blame, which after all, is just a neutral conveyor of information. It is us. It is our behavior overall. But it  didn’t have to be this way. I recall in the early days of public use in the 1990s, initially using plain old modems, and then the old Compuserve, where your identity was just a number, and you were charged for your usage by the hour or minute. (If that were still the case you would not see such a widespread waste of time, given the cost). 

Back then the prospects were wonderful. You could research and access information everywhere, saving countless hours of contacting multiple institutions, and I and others still primarily use it that way. It was a living encyclopedia. As a result, universities and research institutes were the first online. That was unfortunately followed by pornography, which seems to attach itself to anything new, going back to videotapes. No one anticipated social media then, until it sprung out of coarser use as the Worldwide Web unfolded and everyone came on board. Once it essentially became free, usage exploded. 

Thus the Internet itself and all the players in it are not to blame for where we are. It is how we have come to be engaged with it, which is to say our behavior. That is the real problem we face, and it is up to us to change.  

TIMES OF TROUBLE, TIMES OF HOPE

The successful Artemis moon venture, after so many dormant decades, brings back memories of the very first flight around the moon by Borman, Lovell, and Anders aboard Apollo 8. I remember being glued to the TV around the clock as continuous coverage brought us what was probably the most seminal moment in space flight. Witnessing it was an unforgettable, thrilling experience. 

It was the very first human flight beyond earth orbit. It was the first manned Saturn 5 launch. They were the first humans to see the dark side of the moon, and the first live television broadcast from above the moon. It proved the feasibility of lunar travel and set the stage for Apollo 11 landing on the surface half a year later. 

It all happened towards the end of 1968, the worst year in our modern history. It was a time of continuous strife and division; worse than that in our own time, which in many ways originated back then. It was a marvelous, inspirational coda to that terrible year. They witnessed something no other human had ever seen before- the earth rising in the distance over the surface of the moon (the picture above was taken at the time). After orbiting the moon, on Christmas Eve Commander Frank Borman, and then the other crew members began reading from the Book of Genesis during a live broadcast to the whole world. It was one of the most powerful moments in human history. They triumphantly returned to earth a few days later, having completed a flawless mission.

It was a year of enthusiastically watching 2001:A Space Odyssey in a Cinerama theater presentation, and the first Star Trek episodes on TV. It seemed as though the Space Age had truly arrived. But sadly, by the early 1970s the last moon missions were completed and things tapered off. One of the biggest disappointments in my lifetime was the passage of more than fifty years before anyone again ventured to the moon. 

But now at last we have the successful mission of Artemis II to once again inspire us, and this time it will not stop, as we embark on a new age of human space exploration and settlement. Once again in troubled times there is reason for hope as the momentum increases and a space-faring future lies before us.