“For everything you have missed, you have gained something else, and for everything you gain, you lose something else.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
As Jenkins and Thorburn explain, the debate and fear that surrounds new technology has been around longer than we realize. The criticisms that surround the doomed question, “What impact will the Internet have?” are just that, criticisms. The same ones that surrounded the printing of books when people both cheered and feared the distribution of knowledge and words to the masses, or when they also considered this about the transition from still photography to moving images, and again with the arrival of television sets into every home in America.
People fear change. This concept should not shock anyone. The Internet has taken the life we had finally come accustomed to, and added a grander, more powerful, and accessible tool that is changing the world faster than we can understand it. That statement in itself is scary, and I would not necessarily consider that a bad thing. Just as McLuhan says, the technology itself precedes the thought about its impact. I absolutely think this is true of the situation we find ourselves in today regarding the fear of people losing themselves in a virtual world and along the way losing other skills vital to their survival in the “real world.”
To those people on the cusp of deeming the next generation and this new way of life a failure, I say to them to just wait. Just as many of my peers have posted, I completely agree that often extreme views on anything are just that– extreme. There are people that say the virtual world is everything, and mastering it is the only way to survive in these changing times. And then there are those who say the Internet and all the it encompasses is the demise of society. In both cases, I think they are right and wrong. I think more than anything these extremist opinions, especially the negative ones, are based out of fear of the unknown. Perhaps they themselves do not understand the technology, or there is a generational gap that then creates judgement, again because of the unknown. But just as Emerson said in the quote above, new replaces old, there will be new exciting things, but also a loss of older, still great things. That is true of life. That is true of transition. And that is absolutely true of technology.
While it may seem that I am saying we should just brush off the extreme polar views on this topic, I am not. Contrary, anytime you are able to get a society actively involved, interested, and talking about its past, present, and future, it is a beautiful and powerful thing. Although change is scary, this societal and cultural dialogue is exciting.