To be fair, the Internet’s impact on the economy is much less than people assume, especially if you compare it to things like electricity, which did radically transform the economy.
Electricity changed where you could put factories and by extension everything that interacts with them. Electricity single-handedly brought an end to the age of whaling. Electricity brought human communication to nearly the speed of light which is the speed of thought. Electricity is what allows us to record the human voice. Nearly all recorded music is only here because of electricity.
The internet is basically just tv 2.0 (which is itself radio 2.0, famous electric marvel) with a layer of tech arbitrage on top.
A technology that changed how we create and distribute energy down to becoming synonymous with the word “power”, to the extent that it radically reshaped the geography of every nation on the planet earth is not the skeezy parlor trick of computerized mass media.
The internet has such a massive impact on society as a whole. You can look up anything you want. Want to learn how to change the brake cable on an 83 mazda truck? Theres a video. Etc. Etc. Etc. Maybe your taking the access to basic information that not long ago was extremely difficult to find for granted.
Before there even was an internet as we know it the local library had the chiltons manual for that truck. I know because I had a b series and went to the library for the chiltons manual.
Those sections are always big and neighboring counties will collude to make sure they have all the cars covered because it’s such popular information.
There is fantastic potential in the idea of the internet, but what is it? It’s mass media.
Even if it wasn’t and you could fight agent smith inside the matrix and win, the technology that fundamentally changed where people could live and under what limitations is a bigger deal than the one that saves you a trip to the library.
E: sorry if this comes off argumentative. “Electricity is more important than the internet” has some startup lag but the damage is good, it’s got plenty of reach, good hitboxes and can break guards at the end of combos. Once you add in the option to cancel into a roll with iframes it’s hard not to come out a little aggressive.
You’re making massive assumptions about peoples level of access to information prior to the internet. For one, consider any country that didn’t have public libraries. Like several of Americas largest companies are only as big as they are because of the internet.
I wouldn’t disagree that electricity had a much higher impact than the internet, but to write it off as just some extension of the TV or radio is honestly one of the most bonkers things I’ve ever heard.
Places without public libraries weren’t part of the early internet generally. Literally all of Americas biggest companies reached the size they are because of electricity.
I’m not writing the internet off, it’s just a very one sided comparison. When you look at the effects of electricity on human development, the internet is so much closer to radio and tv that classifying it as mass media isn’t outlandish.
You’re comparing a unidirectional medium to a bidirectional medium, just for starters. It’d be much more appropriate to compare the Internet to phone or telegraph, but neither of those are adequate either.
Consider that the internet enabled smartphones. Many other things did too, but the thing that separates smartphones from those other things is Internet. It turned an already cool wireless global voice communication device into the equivalent of like 40 separate devices you used to own 30 years ago, but that fits in your pocket, and can still do unbelievable god-like shit that just wasn’t possible back then, period.
Smartphones are so ridiculous that in many movies made today they have to pretend smartphones don’t exist, because if they did then the problems that form the basis of the plot wouldn’t—so I see a lot of movies that look like they’re set in circa 2000s, i.e. mostly present day with dumbphones. Anyway.
All this is not to say that anything is more impactful than electricity. I’m just saying Internet is not tv 2.0.
If it’s a bidirectional medium then how can isps possibly get away with selling 1Gb down/56kb up connections?
The truth of the matter is that despite technically being bidirectional, most people aren’t using the internet as a bidirectional communication medium. Measure it by data volume or time spent reading versus replying. The internet is mass media, and the fact that a client initiates tls doesn’t make it not tv2.0.
Consider what everyone is calling enshitification: it needs a lot of ink spilled to understand until you recognize that every example is just doing ads or making you pay a cable bill monthly. It’s either the normal ota stuff or a special wire you have put in to get hbo. The internet is mass media.
The idea of technically being a bidirectional medium isn’t even new. Old radios could receive shortwave bands that individual people used to transmit on. You could tune in Jim down the street or the boats in the harbor or the cops from your living room set. It wasn’t until the idea of mass media developed around the technology of radio that sets with only broadcast bands became the norm. There was only a tiny blip of hobbyist tv broadcasting because everyone knew what tv was: radio but bigger and more powerful!
Instead of just telling people how soft wonder bread is you can show it, and show a woman biting into it, make sure the lips are plump and red, yeah, wipe the corner of your mouth just like we practiced, okay now smile and wink like you did that one time.
Programs? Who cares! They’re just there to get people listening before the ad plays, to get people glued to the set before we tell you that bread is getting your dick sucked.
Why are we advertising a thing everyone already buys? So they buy our brand, our process, our raw materials and labor from our suppliers and stores! Seems like a lot of work to juice bread sales, but we put nearly every bakery in the nation out of business!
How could the government allow this to happen? The government did it! The airwaves were leased, sold and even freely given to commercial broadcasters with one catch: one day, they’ll ask a favor, some tiny percentage of the programming will be government messages. Maybe it’s emergency services or televised debates. Maybe it’s acting as a mouthpiece for the war department, maybe just running anti-drug commercials. No matter what form, one day I’m going to need to speak to those people who dutifully tune in every night, maybe directly, maybe through you. I’ll give you the airwaves and you can cultivate them into whatever you like, but you must do me this one favor.
How can people credibly be shocked by the existence of content mill “journalism” meant to maximize ad views and engagement metrics? The internet is mass media, bidirectional by requirement or technicality, but never in common use.
What are we all doing here right now? An activity dwarfed by the volume of advertising and content consumption occurring at any given moment on the internet!
Like I said, measure it by data volume, time spent reading or watching versus replying or posting or however you like and it always comes up one sided.
If you wanna see how close to an Internet forum a bunch of radio weirdos can get, tune to channel 6 (or 19 some places!) anywhere in the south. It’s still a fantastic whirling storm of chaos after 5pm. Even without fucking around on cb there’s plenty of examples of niche communities using radio to communicate before the internet made it easier once everyone had a computer. it was only once everyone had a computer that the transition to them happened and by that point the chatter about dos quilting software or whatever was a drop in the ocean of data sloshing through the pots lines.
![[Not the Onion] Nobel Prize winning economist says Bidenomics is working if you exclude food, energy, shelter, and used cars.](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/056e2b2f-c3f7-43b4-84ae-511a72338a87.png){kind=link}
I don’t know what’s funnier, this
Or this
He is literally the zombie 😂
Which makes it even more impressive that he won the Nobel Prize that year.
being a zombie is a requirement
To be fair, the Internet’s impact on the economy is much less than people assume, especially if you compare it to things like electricity, which did radically transform the economy.
Electricity changed where you could put factories and by extension everything that interacts with them. Electricity single-handedly brought an end to the age of whaling. Electricity brought human communication to nearly the speed of light which is the speed of thought. Electricity is what allows us to record the human voice. Nearly all recorded music is only here because of electricity.
The internet is basically just tv 2.0 (which is itself radio 2.0, famous electric marvel) with a layer of tech arbitrage on top.
A technology that changed how we create and distribute energy down to becoming synonymous with the word “power”, to the extent that it radically reshaped the geography of every nation on the planet earth is not the skeezy parlor trick of computerized mass media.
The internet has such a massive impact on society as a whole. You can look up anything you want. Want to learn how to change the brake cable on an 83 mazda truck? Theres a video. Etc. Etc. Etc. Maybe your taking the access to basic information that not long ago was extremely difficult to find for granted.
I’m not.
Before there even was an internet as we know it the local library had the chiltons manual for that truck. I know because I had a b series and went to the library for the chiltons manual.
Those sections are always big and neighboring counties will collude to make sure they have all the cars covered because it’s such popular information.
There is fantastic potential in the idea of the internet, but what is it? It’s mass media.
Even if it wasn’t and you could fight agent smith inside the matrix and win, the technology that fundamentally changed where people could live and under what limitations is a bigger deal than the one that saves you a trip to the library.
E: sorry if this comes off argumentative. “Electricity is more important than the internet” has some startup lag but the damage is good, it’s got plenty of reach, good hitboxes and can break guards at the end of combos. Once you add in the option to cancel into a roll with iframes it’s hard not to come out a little aggressive.
You’re making massive assumptions about peoples level of access to information prior to the internet. For one, consider any country that didn’t have public libraries. Like several of Americas largest companies are only as big as they are because of the internet.
I wouldn’t disagree that electricity had a much higher impact than the internet, but to write it off as just some extension of the TV or radio is honestly one of the most bonkers things I’ve ever heard.
Places without public libraries weren’t part of the early internet generally. Literally all of Americas biggest companies reached the size they are because of electricity.
I’m not writing the internet off, it’s just a very one sided comparison. When you look at the effects of electricity on human development, the internet is so much closer to radio and tv that classifying it as mass media isn’t outlandish.
The Internet is like TV 2.0?
You’re comparing a unidirectional medium to a bidirectional medium, just for starters. It’d be much more appropriate to compare the Internet to phone or telegraph, but neither of those are adequate either.
Consider that the internet enabled smartphones. Many other things did too, but the thing that separates smartphones from those other things is Internet. It turned an already cool wireless global voice communication device into the equivalent of like 40 separate devices you used to own 30 years ago, but that fits in your pocket, and can still do unbelievable god-like shit that just wasn’t possible back then, period.
Smartphones are so ridiculous that in many movies made today they have to pretend smartphones don’t exist, because if they did then the problems that form the basis of the plot wouldn’t—so I see a lot of movies that look like they’re set in circa 2000s, i.e. mostly present day with dumbphones. Anyway.
All this is not to say that anything is more impactful than electricity. I’m just saying Internet is not tv 2.0.
If it’s a bidirectional medium then how can isps possibly get away with selling 1Gb down/56kb up connections?
The truth of the matter is that despite technically being bidirectional, most people aren’t using the internet as a bidirectional communication medium. Measure it by data volume or time spent reading versus replying. The internet is mass media, and the fact that a client initiates tls doesn’t make it not tv2.0.
Consider what everyone is calling enshitification: it needs a lot of ink spilled to understand until you recognize that every example is just doing ads or making you pay a cable bill monthly. It’s either the normal ota stuff or a special wire you have put in to get hbo. The internet is mass media.
The idea of technically being a bidirectional medium isn’t even new. Old radios could receive shortwave bands that individual people used to transmit on. You could tune in Jim down the street or the boats in the harbor or the cops from your living room set. It wasn’t until the idea of mass media developed around the technology of radio that sets with only broadcast bands became the norm. There was only a tiny blip of hobbyist tv broadcasting because everyone knew what tv was: radio but bigger and more powerful!
Instead of just telling people how soft wonder bread is you can show it, and show a woman biting into it, make sure the lips are plump and red, yeah, wipe the corner of your mouth just like we practiced, okay now smile and wink like you did that one time.
Programs? Who cares! They’re just there to get people listening before the ad plays, to get people glued to the set before we tell you that bread is getting your dick sucked.
Why are we advertising a thing everyone already buys? So they buy our brand, our process, our raw materials and labor from our suppliers and stores! Seems like a lot of work to juice bread sales, but we put nearly every bakery in the nation out of business!
How could the government allow this to happen? The government did it! The airwaves were leased, sold and even freely given to commercial broadcasters with one catch: one day, they’ll ask a favor, some tiny percentage of the programming will be government messages. Maybe it’s emergency services or televised debates. Maybe it’s acting as a mouthpiece for the war department, maybe just running anti-drug commercials. No matter what form, one day I’m going to need to speak to those people who dutifully tune in every night, maybe directly, maybe through you. I’ll give you the airwaves and you can cultivate them into whatever you like, but you must do me this one favor.
How can people credibly be shocked by the existence of content mill “journalism” meant to maximize ad views and engagement metrics? The internet is mass media, bidirectional by requirement or technicality, but never in common use.
Never in common use? What on gods green earth are we all doing here in this comment section right now?
Also to compare using radios to chat around your local area to the ability of people to form a community like lemmy is also a ridiculous comparison.
I’m genuinely fascinated by you. This is the hottest take I’ve seen in my entire life.
What are we all doing here right now? An activity dwarfed by the volume of advertising and content consumption occurring at any given moment on the internet!
Like I said, measure it by data volume, time spent reading or watching versus replying or posting or however you like and it always comes up one sided.
If you wanna see how close to an Internet forum a bunch of radio weirdos can get, tune to channel 6 (or 19 some places!) anywhere in the south. It’s still a fantastic whirling storm of chaos after 5pm. Even without fucking around on cb there’s plenty of examples of niche communities using radio to communicate before the internet made it easier once everyone had a computer. it was only once everyone had a computer that the transition to them happened and by that point the chatter about dos quilting software or whatever was a drop in the ocean of data sloshing through the pots lines.
We wouldn’t have the internet without electricity. The internet is part of the impact electricity has.
You wouldn’t have electricity without metal things, so metalsmithing has a bigger impact. But you can’t manipulate metal without fire…
Basically sticks are the most impactful.
The internet is a product of electricity, soooo, yeah.
You can have that title, or winner of the Nobel prize on the cover, not both.