Internet Essay Quotes

All I could think of was that the teachers must've found the illegal stash of candy I'd been selling out of my dorms room. Or maybe they'd realized I got my Essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.

I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don't want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.

The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era. Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-word review is hard work for artificial intelligences, whereas star ratings are ideal for them.

Once a cucumber turns into a pickle, you can't turn it back into a cucumber. And I've been pickled by the internet for a long time.

Texting is not talking and a phone is not a friend.

These days, after drinking from the internet's fire hose for thirty years, I've begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don't know if it's my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, "The world is too much with us; late and soon.

There are times when I wish finding community was as simple as entering some personal information and letting an algorithm show me where I belong. And then I realize that in many ways, this is what the Internet and social networking has done for me—offered community.

But unfortunately, I'm forced to be a grown-up in life. On the internet I'm still sixteen.

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you're living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

In those happy dark ages before cell phones and the internet, such miscalculations were solved not by changing the situation but by changing yourself. I put on another sweater and my coat. I

We thought that replacing the singular, authoritative voice of the twentieth century newscaster with the digitally-enabled vox populi of the internet would forever change the narrative. All it did was ruin the spelling.

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please. "The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere. "I'm working on it.

The internet would seem an antidote to conspiracy theories and state secrecy, but it has only amplified both.

The woman that does not require validation from anyone is the most feared individual on the planet. Our desire for validation is far older than the internet.

...it dawned on me the other day that, for me, the Internet has to be a meticulously curated digital space in which your uncle's vaguely racist tweets have no place.

I think we should permanently cut off the internet access of any company that sends out three erroneous copyright notices. Three strikes and you’re out, mate.

The Internet has gotten me off of email. The iPhone has gotten me off the laptop. If the laptop is cocaine, the iPhone is crack. And I take these hits of crack before, during, and after everything.

Or maybe they’d realized I got my essay on Tom Sawyer from the Internet without ever reading the book and now they were going to take away my grade. Or worse, they were going to make me read the book.

Do you fear that life without the internet would be boring, empty, or joyless? No, I think it would be beautiful. I imagine myself on a rocky beach, clutching something green. It's probably seaweed, but maybe it's moss. I drink a lot of chamomile tea. I "show up" for myself. Yeah, it would be empty.

I still can’t believe that someone as hot as you has validation issues but I also know that being a very sensitive person on this planet is painful and some of us are built like sieves, or have holes where any external validation just pours right through and we never get full, and I also know it’s ultimately an inside job anyway and no amount of external validation will ever be enough (though damn it can feel good in the moment, and it sort of makes me mad at god, actually, like, okay god, you built me like this so teach me how to validate myself in a way that feels as good as when a boy does it or the Internet does it, because there is always a cost when a boy does it or when the Internet does it): a love story.

All of us have, at some point, logged on and thought, This seems like a good idea! And sometimes that changes when you discover that the internet is actually just other people, and other people, scientists say, are terrible.

These days, after drinking from the internet's fire hose for thirty years, I've begun to feel more of those negative effects. I don't know if it's my age, or the fact that the internet is no longer plugged into the wall and now travels with me everywhere I go, but I find myself thinking of that Wordsworth poem that begins, "The world is too much with us; late and soon.” What does it say that I can't imagine my life or my work without the internet? What does it mean to have my way of thinking, and my way of being, so profoundly shaped my machine logic? What does it mean that, having been part of the internet for so long, the internet is also part of me? My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you're living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push. Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go. Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-reviewer.

Reading a book carves brand-new neural pathways into the ancient cortical bedrock of our brains. It transforms the way we see the world. Makes us, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his recent essay 'The Dreams of Readers', 'more alert to the inner lives of others'. We become vampires without being bitten. In other words, more empathic. Books make us see in a way that casual immersion in the Internet, and the quickfire virtual world it offers, doesn't.

The theory is that if the Internet can't be controlled, then copyright is dead. The thing is, the Internet is a machine for copying things cheaply, quickly, and with as little control as possible, while copyright is the right to control who gets to make copies, so these two abstractions seem destined for a fatal collision, right?

journalists fea their loss of authority in the digital age will undermine their ability to hold government to account. Yet the government has much more to worry about because the internet has empowered vested interests, and Oppositions, in a way that effectively cancel an election result within weeks of the final ballot being counted. p236

The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you're living in the middle of history, you never know what I means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means.

I try to set rules around my internet usage. The act of rule-setting means that I am probably an Internet addict. Like people who aren't addicts don't need to set rules about things. They just do them.

In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error.

I still can't believe someone as hot as you has validation issues but I also know that being a very sensitive person on this planet is painful and some of us are built like sieves, or have holes where any external validation just pours right through and we never get full, and I also know it's ultimately an inside job anyway and no amount of external validation will ever be enough (though damn it can feel good in the moment, and it sort of makes me mad at god, actually, like, okay god, you built me like this so teach me how to validate myself in a way that feels as good as when a boy does it or the Internet does it, because there is always a cost when a boy does it or the Internet does it): a love story.

Phrases offered to the grief-stricken, such as “time heals all wounds” and “the day will come when you reach closure” irritated him, and there were times when he sat silent, seeming half-buried in some sediment of sorrow. “Closure? When someone beloved dies there is no ‘closure.’” He disliked television programs featuring tornado chasers squealing “Big one! Big one!” and despised the rat-infested warrens of the Internet, riddled with misinformation and chicanery. He did not like old foreign movies where, when people parted, one stood in the middle of the road and waved. He thought people with cell phones should be immolated along with those who overcooked pasta. Calendars, especially the scenic types with their glowing views of a world without telephone lines, rusting cars or burger stands, enraged him, but he despised the kittens, motorcycles, famous women and jazz musicians of the special-interest calendars as well. “Why not photographs of feral cats? Why not diseases?” he said furiously. Wal-Mart trucks on the highway received his curses and perfumed women in elevators invited his acid comment that they smelled of animal musk glands. For years he had been writing an essay entitled “This Land Is NOT Your Land.

The rough-and-ready intellectual consensus of the mid-Twentieth Century is being pushed out by a New Superstition whose victims can find testimony on the Internet for anything they choose to believe. The only cure for it is reading books, and lots of them.

A fashionable idea in technical circles is that quantity not only turns into quality at some extreme of scale, but also does so according to principles we already understand. Some of my colleagues think a million, or perhaps a billion, fragmentary insults will eventually yield wisdom that surpasses that of any well-thought-out essay, so long as sophisticated secret statistical algorithms recombine the fragments. I disagree. A trope from the early days of computer science comes to mind: garbage in, garbage out.

It feels like the internet was built to desensitize us. Like it’s part of a bigger scheme to make even the most sensitive among us tolerant of mass destruction and televised death so we’re more naturally able to cope with the world being destroyed in front of our eyes.

But now it seems clear that literary criticism was inherently doomed. Explicitly or otherwise it had based itself on a structure of echelons and hierarchies; it was about the talent elite. And the structure atomized as soon as the forces of democratization gave their next concerted push. Those forces – incomparably the most potent in our culture – have gone on pushing. And they are now running up against a natural barrier. Some citadels, true, have proved stormable. You can become rich without having any talent (via the scratchcard and the rollover jackpot). You can become famous without having any talent (by abasing yourself on some TV nerdathon; a clear improvement on the older method of simply killing a celebrity and inheriting the aura). But you cannot become talented without having any talent. Therefore, talent must go. Literary criticism, now almost entirely confined to the universities, thus moves against talent by moving against the canon. Academic preferment will not come from a respectful study of Wordsworth’s poetics; it will come from a challenging study of his politics – his attitude toward the poor, say, or his unconscious ‘valorization’ of Napoleon; and it will come still faster if you ignore Wordsworth and elevate some (justly) neglected contemporary, by which process the canon may be quietly and steadily sapped. A brief consultation of the Internet will show that meanwhile, everyone has become a literary critic – or at least, a book-reviewer.

The person with whom I am in a primary relationship calls my phone my “boyfriend.” He becomes elated when the battery dies. One time he threatened to throw it out the window. He is way more concerned with the way I use the Internet to shut him out than anything I could do sexually with another person.

And in an ironic twist, Neal Stephenson, the acclaimed cyberpunk author who helped form our popular conception of the Internet age, is near impossible to reach electronically—his website offers no e-mail address and features an essay about why he is purposefully bad at using social media. Here’s how he once explained the omission: “If I organize my life in such a way that I get lots of long, consecutive, uninterrupted time-chunks, I can write novels. [If I instead get interrupted a lot] what replaces it? Instead of a novel that will be around for a long time … there is a bunch of e-mail messages that I have sent out to individual persons.

What renders you incapable of such a rudeness, is nothing but a regard to the general rules of civility and hospitality, which prohibit it. … But if without regard to these general rules, even the duties of politeness, which are so easily observed, and which one can scarce have any serious motive to violate, would yet be so frequently violated, that what would become of the duties of justice, of truth, of chastity, of fidelity, which it is often so difficult to observe, and which there may be so many strong motives to violate? But upon the tolerable observance of these duties, depends the very existence of human society, which would crumble into nothing if mankind were not generally impressed with a reverence for those important rules of conduct.

The person with whom I am in a primary relationship calls my phone my “boyfriend.” He becomes elated when the battery dies. One time he threatened to throw it out the window. He is way more concerned with the way I use the Internet to shut him out than anything I could do sexually with another person. I tell him that I am not shutting him out. I am shutting out reality. Unfortunately for him, he is real.

Why can't the IRL people be more like the Internet people? This is maybe because real people aren't pixelated. Their mistakes and annoyingness can't be repurposed into a fantasy. I actually have to see the real people and be seen by them. If people never become real, it's harder for them to disappoint you. That's why the Internet is good for sad people. You can be with people without having to be with people.

If you’ve lifted a song or a film off the Internet without paying—if you’ve got something out of it, as we say—if you’ve treated it as a gift, which by its nature has spiritual worth but no monetary value, what do you owe its creator, who has been the instrument through which it has arrived in your hands? Your gratitude, via a word of thanks? Your serious attention? The price of a latte deposited in a beggar’s-bowl e-tip jar? The answer is never “nothing.

The irony is that the kind of empathy that many women who believe themselves to be hooked up with narcissists describe themselves as having (calling themselves in contrast to their narcissist an “empath,” a “clairvoyant,” a highly sensitive person) then gets in the way of their understanding the narc at all. And at the other end of the scale, perhaps we are inclined to exaggerate our empathetic abilities when we confront strangers at the pace of the Internet.

Was it love when we met on the Internet? Was it love when he pursued me with silly messages and praise for my writing and a picture drawn in my favourite candy? When an attractive person pursues you, there is the luxury of not having to worry about whether it is love, because you are not the one don't the pursuing. At least, not at first. My usual habit of falling for people, when I think I am not falling, seemed irrelevant. He poked and messaged and "liked" and faved my every Internet itch. I had feelings, any feelings, under control.

Consider this oddly neglected fact: the West was acquired, conquested, and largely consolidated into the nation coincident with the greatest breakthrough in the history of human communication. The breakthrough was the telegraph. The great advances that followed it, the telephone, radio, television, and the Internet, were all elaborations on its essential contribution. The telegraph separated the person from the message. Before it, with a few exceptions such as a sephamore and carrier pigeons, information moved only as fast as people did. By the nineteenth century, people were certainly moving a lot faster, and indeed a second revolution, that of transportation, was equally critical in creating the West, but before the telegraph a message still had to move with a person, either as a document or in somebody’s head. The telegraph liberated information. Now it could travel virtually at the speed of light. The railroad carried people and things, including letters, ten to fifteen times faster than the next most rapid form of movement. The telegraph accelerated communication more than forty million times. A single dot of Morse code traveled from Kansas City to Denver faster than the click it produced moved from the receiver to the telegrapher’s eardrum.

Martin Amis once said, of death, that ‘after forty, it’s a full-time job looking the other way’. I sometimes wonder if, at any adult age, it’s also a full-time job – although a less conscious one – looking the “other way’. I sometimes wonder if, at any adult age, it’s also a full-time job – although a less conscious one – looking the other way from the killing of animals. I consider most statements on the internet and elsewhere of people claiming to be on the right side of history as always specious, but if you are foolishly going to try and imagine the moral order of the “future, the one thing I’d be happy to put a small bet on is that in three hundred years’ time people will see our industrial slaughter of animals as a type of genocide.

Between my generation and that of my students is an entire cohort of writers in their 30s and 40s. I think they’ve suffered most from the climate I’m describing. They prepared for their trade in the traditional way, by reading literature, learning something about history or foreign countries, training as reporters, and developing the habit of thinking in complexity. And now that they’ve reached their prime, these writers must wonder: Who’s the audience for all this? Where did the broad and persuadable public that I always had in mind go? What’s the point of preparation and knowledge and painstaking craft, when what the internet wants is volume and speed and the loudest voices? Who still reads books? Some give in to the prevailing current, and they might enjoy their reward. Those who don’t are likely to withdraw. The greatest enemy of writing today might be despair. From a speech made in January 2020 on receipt of the 2019 Hitchens Prize, also printed as an essay in The Atlantic.

In “Internet of Stings,” Jennifer Howard began one of the more disconcerting essays about some of these issues that came up in interviews with one of the purveyors of false news: As one master of the fake-news genre told the Washington Post55: “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore.” Separating truth from fiction takes time, information literacy, and an open mind, all of which seem in short supply in a distracted, polarized culture. We love to share instantly—and that makes us easy to manipulate. There are many tough issues here for students, teachers, parents, and the members of our republic. How our citizens think, decide, and vote depends on their collective ability to navigate the complex realities of a digital milieu with intellects not just capable of, but accustomed to higher-level understanding and analysis. It is no longer only a matter of which medium is better for what; it is a question of how the optimal mode of thought in our children and our young adults and ourselves can be fostered in this moment of history. These are hardly new thoughts either for

Because another thing we look away from, in the killing of animals, is just how much they are like us. One of the things the internet has done is circulate, on a vast scale, short films of animals being cute. A lot of the time this means: being like us. I watched, once, some YouTube footage of a pig who had been raised by a specific human and allowed to grow old. In the clip the pig sees this human again after several years of separation and rushes over to the edge of the pigsty, braying and trying to leap the fence with what seemed to my eyes like joy: like the joy of recognition – indeed, of love. If you post links to such films approvingly, cynics – men (always men) born with the knowledge that they know best – will tell you, with lordly condescension, that you are anthropomorphising. By which they mean projecting human emotions and responses onto animals. When they say this, they tend not “to consider the possibility that if this were not anthropomorphism – if the pig just, as the film clearly suggests, had empathy and memory and other-directedness, if it was really overjoyed to see the person who reared it again years later, if it was capable of love – if the pig were showing the big emotions which we humans think make us special, then complacently slaughtering and eating pigs might become a bit problematic.

Donner un avis n’est pas compliqué. On peut donner un avis au Maroc. On peut donner un avis sur la monarchie. Et d’ailleurs, on peut le voir, le Maroc applique une relative liberté où tout est accessible en termes de médias. Tous les sites internet sont accessibles à partir du Maroc et aucun site n’est bloqué. Il y a peu de pays identiques. Il n’y a pas de sites bloqués. Vous allez en Turquie, c’est différent. Vous allez en Thaïlande, ce n’est pas la même chose. Vous pouvez aller dans beaucoup de pays où j’ai pu voyager, il y a beaucoup de sites, parfois Facebook, parfois Twitter, qui sont soumis à des restrictions. Au Maroc, il y a eu le blocage de la VoIP pour les communications Whatsapp, ça a été un scandale et ça a été rétabli. Il y a, surtout sur les réseaux sociaux et sur internet, une liberté absolue. Liberté ne rime pas avec qualité. Parce qu’il y a toutes sortes de choses dans cette liberté. Il y a des sites qui sont orduriers. Ce n’est pas non plus la panacée, la liberté absolue. Encore faut-il qu’il y ait un peu de régulation. Il nous manque peut-être au Maroc un peu de régulation… Cela ne signifie pas qu’il faudrait interdire, loin de là, mais peut-être essayer de sévir aussi et de faire respecter la loi… Il ne faut pas non plus que ça soit l’anarchie, la diffamation, des maîtres chanteurs… C’est quelque chose qui peut influer négativement sur les médias marocains qui sont sur le net. Entretien avec Souleïman Bencheikh : « C’est quand même mieux ici qu’en Turquie… »

A LITTLE BIT before Adeline made her unforgivable mistake, a billionaire named Sheryl Sandberg wrote a book called Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead. Sheryl Sandberg didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. In her book, Sheryl Sandberg proposed that women who weren’t billionaires could stop being treated like crap by men in the workplace if only they smiled more and worked harder and acted more like the men who treated them like crap. Billionaires were always giving advice to people who weren’t billionaires about how to become billionaires. It was almost always intolerable bullshit. SANDBERG BECAME A BILLIONAIRE by working for a company named Facebook. Facebook made its money through an Internet web and mobile platform which advertised cellphones, feminine hygiene products and breakfast cereals. This web and mobile platform was also a place where hundreds of millions of people offered up too much information about their personal lives. Facebook was invented by Mark Zuckerberg, who didn’t have much eumelanin in the basale stratum of his epidermis. What is your gender? asked Facebook. What is your relationship status? asked Facebook. What is your current city? asked Facebook. What is your name? asked Facebook. What are your favorite movies? asked Facebook. What is your favorite music? asked Facebook. What are your favorite books? asked Facebook. ADELINE’S FRIEND, the writer J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, had read an essay called “Generation Why?” by Zadie Smith, a British writer with a lot of eumelanin in the basale stratum of her epidermis. Zadie Smith’s essay pointed out that the questions Facebook asked of its users appeared to have been written by a 12-year-old. But these questions weren’t written by a 12-year-old. They were written by Mark Zuckerberg. Mark Zuckerberg was a billionaire. Mark Zuckerberg was such a billionaire that he was the boss of other billionaires. He was Sheryl Sandberg’s boss. J. Karacehennem thought that he knew something about Facebook that Zadie Smith, in her decency, hadn’t imagined. “The thing is,” said J. Karacehennem, whose last name was Turkish for Black Hell, “that we’ve spent like, what, two or three hundred years wrestling with existentialism, which really is just a way of asking, Why are we on this planet? Why are people here? Why do we lead our pointless lives? All the best philosophical and novelistic minds have tried to answer these questions and all the best philosophical and novelistic minds have failed to produce a working answer. Facebook is amazing because finally we understand why we have hometowns and why we get into relationships and why we eat our stupid dinners and why we have names and why we own idiotic cars and why we try to impress our friends. Why are we here, why do we do all of these things? At last we can offer a solution. We are on Earth to make Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg richer. There is an actual, measurable point to our striving. I guess what I’m saying, really, is that there’s always hope.

A popular Internet essay notes: “There is no egg in egg plant, neither apple nor pine in pineapple. A guinea pig is neither from Guinea nor is it a pig. If the plural of tooth is teeth, why isn’t the plural of booth beeth? One goose, two geese. So one moose, two meese? If teachers taught, why haven’t preachers praught? We have noses that run and feet that smell. How can a slim chance and a fat chance be the same, while a wise man and a wise guy are opposites?

Algunos periódicos anuncian la llegada de los niños indocumentados como se anunciaría una plaga bíblica: ¡Cuidado! ¡Las langostas! Cubrirán la faz de la tierra hasta que no quede exento ni un milímetro —estos amenazantes niños y niñas de piel tostada, de ojos rasgados y cabellera de obsidiana. Caerán del cielo, sobre nuestros coches, sobre nuestros techos, en nuestros jardines recién podados. Caerán sobre nuestras cabezas. Invadirán nuestras escuelas, nuestras iglesias, nuestros domingos. Traerán consigo su caos, sus enfermedades contagiosas, su mugre bajo las uñas, su oscuridad. Eclipsarán los paisajes y los horizontes, llenarán el futuro de malos presagios y colmarán nuestra lengua de barbarismos. Y, si dejamos que se queden aquí, a la larga, se reproducirán. Leemos periódicos, revisamos páginas de internet, escuchamos la radio y tratamos de responder a las preguntas de nuestra hija. Nos preguntamos si las reacciones de la gente serían distintas si, por ejemplo, estos niños fueran de un color más claro, si fueran de “mejores” nacionalidades y genealogías más “puras”. ¿Los tratarían más como personas? ¿Más como niños?

Or maybe the whole Internet will simply become like Facebook: falsely jolly, fake-friendly, self-promoting, slickly disingenuous.

McSweeny’s Internet Tendency,” a web-based collection of humor pieces from various authors.

In the 1970s, the literary critic Lionel Trilling mused that the authentic self, though best left undefined, was most likely the 'distinction between an inner true self and an outer false self'. The internet has created a strict line between these selves, where we understand our extrinsic self to be one crouching inside our smartphone and our intrinsic self to be hiding at home on the sofa. But it is not enough to have these separate selves; it is inauthentic to present one self online and another at home. And so we attempt to break down these boundaries through endless sharing, turning ourselves inside out for the consumption of others. Sharing has become how we socialise.

Japanese seem to be very private individuals, so the use of mobile internet and texting seem to be an important part of the Japanese culture.  American’s view of whether to call or text with a cell phone is based on whether how difficult it would to communicate a message to another individual. 

requires us to divide our attention between ever more emails, text messages, cellphone calls, video streams, and blinking banners, resulting, he argues, in lowered productivity and a distracted life devoid of meaning and depth. A similar point is made by Hal Crowther (2010: 108) in an essay in Granta: Though the educational potential of the Internet is limitless, it is becoming apparent that wired students use technology less to learn than to distract themselves from learning, and to take advantage of toxic shortcuts like research-paper databases and essay-writing websites.

The same problems of distribution arise in computer networks. As networks get bigger and as the machines that make them up become more equal, the whole approach to moving information around changes from centralized to distributed. The packet-switching system that makes things like the Internet work would be immediately familiar to the Chinese. Instead of requisitioning a hunk of optical fiber between Point A and Point B and slamming the data down it in one big shipment, the packet data network breaks the data down into tiny pieces and sends them out separately, just as a Chinese enterprise might break a large shipment down into small pieces and send each one out on a separate bicycle, knowing that each one might take a different route but that they’d all get there eventually.

Middle school was a hell for every one of us, and luckily the internet has made it so we can feel exactly how we did then every day, forever.

The internet exacerbates the worst instincts of the dominant

What are you looking for when you read students’ essays? • What are some of the things you hate to see in an application? • Is demonstrated interest a factor in your admission decision? • Are admission decisions need-blind? • What kind of student does well here? What kind of student doesn’t do well here? • Did you attend this college? What has changed since you’ve been here? • What changes do you see taking place on campus in the next five years? • What are recent alumni doing? • What do you think your school is best known for? • How would you describe the typical student here? • How does the school help freshmen adjust to college? • How is academic advising handled? • Are there on-campus jobs available for students? • How are roommates assigned? • What is the Internet situation? Is the entire campus wireless? Do you support Macs or PCs? • How do meal plans work? • How much of a role does the surrounding community play in students’ daily life?

But, irrespective of the internet’s CompuServes, nodes, bulletin boards, Lexus—whatever makes the information highway work—there is something the press can do in language that a society cannot do. You’ve done it before. Move us closer to participatory democracy; help us distinguish between a pseudo-experience and a living one, between an encounter and an engagement, between theme and life. Help us all try to figure out what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

I wonder if the things that the internet brought me ever could have been overshadowed by the things it took from me.

If they order you to take a fucking vaccine, you will not ask what is in the vaccine, or start whining about the “potential side effects.” You will shut up and take the fucking vaccine. If they tell you to put a mask on your kid, you will put a fucking mask on your fucking kid.10 You will not go digging up Danish studies11 proving the pointlessness of putting masks on kids.12 If they tell you the Russians rigged the election, then the Russians rigged the fucking election. And, if four years later they turn around and tell you that rigging an election is impossible, then rigging an election is fucking impossible. It isn’t an invitation to debate. It is a GloboCap-verified fact-checked fact. You will stand (or kneel) in your designated, color-coded, social-distancing box and repeat this verified fact-checked fact, over and over, like a fucking parrot, or they will discover some new mutant variant of virus and put you back in fucking “lockdown.” They will do this until you get your mind right, or you can live the rest of your life on Zoom, or tweeting content that no one but the Internet censors will ever see into the digital void in your fucking pajamas.

registered email address and went global in 2007. Twitter split off onto its own platform and went global in 2007. Airbnb was born in 2007. In 2007, VMware—the technology that enabled any operating system to work on any computer, which enabled cloud computing—went public, which is why the cloud really only took off in 2007. Hadoop software—which enabled a million computers to work together as if they were one, giving us “Big Data”—was launched in 2007. Amazon launched the Kindle e-book reader in 2007. IBM launched Watson, the world's first cognitive computer, in 2007. The essay launching Bitcoin was written in 2006. Netflix streamed its first video in 2007. IBM introduced nonsilicon materials into its microchips to extend Moore's Law in 2007. The Internet crossed one billion users in late 2006, which seems to have been a tipping point. The price of sequencing a human genome collapsed in 2007. Solar energy took off in 2007, as did a process for extracting natural gas from tight shale, called fracking. Github, the world's largest repository of open source software, was launched in 2007. Lyft, the first ride-sharing site, delivered its first passenger in 2007. Michael Dell, the founder of Dell, retired in 2005. In 2007, he decided he'd better come back to work—because in 2007, the world started to get really fast. It was a real turning point. Today, we have taken another

Ten Rules for the Novelist: 1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.   2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.   3. Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.   4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.   5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.   6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.   7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.   8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.   9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting. 10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

Self-care has become a default way to maintain a sense of control in a chaotic world. I don't think the world has necessarily become more chaotic, but the idea of choice certainly has - there are so many options thrown at us daily, from both the marketplace and the internet- and amidst this chaos of choice, we double down: less willing to relinquish control over ourselves, our bodies, our careers.

I don’t live my live according to a rigid set of ideas and theories that only apply perfectly on the internet. There is real world where your own rules apply. I live my life according to prioritizing my happy ending in the world where i am statistically the least likely to witness that. And that’s my feminism. You are welcome to define yours.

In 1871, a visitor to the Los Angeles Public Library published an essay imagining a future in which the library would be miraculously compressed into an object the size of a suitcase. Considering how physical, how insistently tangible, libraries are—their pounds of pages and bindings, the mass and fleshy bulk of books—such a notion must have seemed as preposterous as landing on Mars. Of course, with the invention of the computer and the Internet, that is exactly what has happened. The library has a large amount of material that isn’t online, but the notion of much of it being pocket-size and contained in a small plastic box has been true for some time.

Its disregard of borders, national infrastructures, local bureaucracies, internet censors, tariffs, laws, and languages; its disregard of margins and the marginal people who live there; its formidable, engulfing properties accelerating erasure, a flattening out of difference, of specificity for marketing purposes. An abhorrence of diversity. We imagine indistinguishability, the elimination of minority languages, minority cultures in its Wake. We speculate with horror on what could be the irrevocable, enfeebling alteration of major languages, major cultures in its sweep. Even if those dreaded consequences are not made completely manifest, they nevertheless cancel out globalism's assurances of better life by issuing dire warnings of premature cultural death.

Thus, for example, the idea of progress has disappeared, yet progress continues. The idea of wealth that production once connoted has disappeared, yet production itself continues more vigorously than ever. Indeed, it picks up speed precisely in proportion to its increasing indifference to its original aims. Of the political sphere one can say that the idea of politics has disappeared but that the game of politics continues in secret indifference to its own stakes. Of television, that it operates in total indifference to its own images (it would not be affected, in other words, even were mankind to disappear). Could it be that all systems, all individuals, harbour a secret urge to be rid of their ideas, of their own essences, so as to be able to proliferate everywhere, to transport themselves simultaneously to every point of the compass? In any event, the consequences of a dissociation of this kind can only be fatal. A thing which has lost its idea is like the man who has lost his shadow, and it must either fall under the sway of madness or perish.

The internet rewarded all the parts of my personality that the tangible world didn’t: sarcasm, cynicism, and a refusal to enjoy almost anything.

But no one on the internet is actually a person; they’re just an amalgamation of human parts, like a robot made from all the components of a person but missing the essentials, like a brain or a lymphatic system. It sounds like a person and, sometimes, looks like one, but it’s not. It’s an idea. You can’t get mad at ideas as if they’re people. An idea isn’t going to hold your hand. Ideas don’t owe you anything.

The internet is a splendid invention, and it won’t go away. If you know you want something, the internet can get it for you. My point, and the whole point of this essay, is that it’s not enough to get what you already know you wanted. The best things are the things you never knew you wanted until you got them.

We are the internet that we bemoan; we are building this city ourselves.

If you’re curious as to whether your unusual experiences are signs of mental illness or psychic ability, the internet is happy to offer an opinion.

An important fact about Elinor that the reader should know is that even though she often felt a lot of free-floating, nonspecific anxiety, she was actually very good at blocking out specific thoughts. Here’s how it worked: An anxiety-provoking thought would surface, unbidden, in her mind, but almost as soon as it happened, a new thought would occur in its place. The new thought usually adopted the kind of positivist, instructive, and generalized tone of the personal essays Elinor read on the Internet, which gave Elinor a feeling that the new thought was better than the old thought because it was valorized by collective wisdom. Instead of worrying about Mike’s mother, and her specific idiosyncrasies or motivations, for example, Elinor would start to think about mothers in general, and how they loved their children but needed individuality. This new thought would then compete with the latent anxiety left behind by the old thought, the content of which Elinor had almost convinced herself she had forgotten.

Despite the perma-shock in which many of us have lived our entire lives, with alarms in our ears made only more shrill by 24 hour news cycles, and unrelenting internet death row photos of dogs and cats at animal shelters, we inexplicably expect our shocking truths--that ours is a society built on oppression, rape and murder--to get heard the first time through. When the truths aren't heard, we end up beyond frustrated. We butt up against other people's moral hypocrisies and shut down as we hear the same stories about people who are compassionate but still eat animals. We grow weary of taking people's hands and walking them down the road to see the more than 23 million chickens killed for food every day in the U.S. And we forget that people can't see the animals hiding in their words and signifiers; we forget that we can't see them either. Beyond beef and bacon, there are other words that hide animals: deforestation, road construction, housing development, war. We must learn to be attuned to those words. And we have to learn how to speak kindly to people who are thinking about them, even if they don't recognize the absent referents in their speech. When we are thinking about how oppressors have guns, prisons, and slaughterhouses, we remember that words are weapons. When we turn them on each other and our potential allies, we forget. Out of frustration over all the things that haven't gotten better, we resort to name calling, dismiss the possibility of bridge building with other movements and within our own, and retreat back to internet cliques to discuss cupcake recipes or bash something read in the Huffington Post.