How more communication (the internet) changes the world

[yesthattom]

You know the “The Emperor’s New Clothes”? THe Emperor hires two swindlers to make him a new suit. They pretend to make invisible clothes, and the Emperor walks around naked. Everyone is afraid to say anything, but a child speaks up, “But he has nothing on!” because he doesn’t know any better. The crowd realizes that he has said what everyone else was thinking, but were afraid to say. However now the subject has been broached, it is ok to say it, and the King is embarrassed for being the fool that he is.

There are many situations like this in the real world. We have a social term for it, the Elephant in the room. Everyone sees something but nobody talks about it, so it doesn’t exist.

If you talk with people in fascist countries, the people there don’t seem to feel that they live in a fascist country. They often live quiet well, they just don’t talk about the bad stuff.

But if one person stands up and says, “Hey! That’s not right!” then other people realize that they can say it too.

That’s why a fascist doesn’t want rallies to even start, let alone happen.

The bigger effect is that people that hadn’t been self-aware enough to see the unspoken truth realize the reality that is in front of their face. “Ah! My uncle didn’t just go away, he was taken away!”

The internet has that effect in many ways. We see things and read about things that make us realize, “Hey! I’ve always felt that way but I hid it because I thought I was the only one!”

Here are some of the lies that we believe that exposure to the internet can expose:

The lie.	Evidence to the contrary that gets ignored.
We can only love one person.	Isn’t the number of people that remarry proof enough that this isn’t true? How many poly people suddenly realize that their paretns or other friends were poly without calling it that, or were dishonest to one partner about the other?
Sex is bad, unless we do it with a husband/wife.	Sex can be good with anyone that is compatible and/or good at it. Why would a piece of paper determine the power of your orgasm? That goes against the laws of physics and physiology
Sex is only ok if it is the man-abusing-woman kind like in the media.	Check out all the woman-run porn sites, non-sexist web sites; heck, check out all the LiveJournals, blogs, chat rooms, etc. where women talk about (oh dear!) liking sex!
Gay people are all perverts that only think about sex	Andrew Sullivan.
Homosexuality is so evil that thinking about it will turn you gay.	Andrew Sullivan.
Depression is rare and depressed people are bad.	LJ, chat rooms, blogs, etc. by highly successful people that show how dealing with their depression is just another hurdle like everything else they overcome
Recreational drugs are so bad that nobody can figure out why anyone would touch them	A lot of in-school programs portray illegal drugs as unfun and painful. The truth is that they’re called “recreational” because they’re fun. Yes, they have downsides, but it isn’t like Refeer Madness.
Nobody does illegal drugs... except a few bad people.	The number of people that admit to smoking pot on LJ is incredible and proof that it is more like beer (not to say there aren’t alcoholics, but there are plenty of people that have a few beers a week)
Everyone believes in God.	Atheists are some of the people you meet all over the place
Only through God can moral people exist.	Obvious once you meet loving, moral people that are atheists.
Microsoft is the only operating system that makes sense for business.	The open source movement only exists because the internet lets people talk without the PR departments of software companies getting in the way. Heck, every time your grandmother “googles” she’s using Linux, she just doesn’t know.
People can’t use a computer without an IT department protecting them by dictating what to use.	People find applications on the web all the time. People forward their email to gmail/yahoo/hotmail so they can have better anti-spam protection than their IT department provides
IM is for children, not business.	People use IM all the time for just about everything (I’ve met sales people that IM with clients more than they talk on the phone
Porn is bad.	Makes you feel good
Old people are ugly	They aren’t.
Fat people can’t be beautiful, happy, or sexy.	Obvious
People in other countries think just like we do	Sooo many times I’ve seen people have an “ah ha” moment on Usenet, IRC, LJ, etc. etc. etc. Heck, just reading foreign blogs (English or using a translator) is a breath of freshair for people.

What’s what I came up with from just a few minutes of thinking. What would you add to this list?

Comments

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

I don't know how to word it,but the fact that people often learn that the people they chat with are very different from themselves,and it was only assumed that they were the same as the reader.Guess what,some od the "different" people in the world are right where you can hear or see them,not far far away

[kimuchi.livejournal.com]

I don't really think the internet was responsible for some of these. At least some of them were self-evident to me in my pre-Internet life thanks to, say, Newsweek or CNN or chatting with a foreign exchange student or just looking around.

The Microsoft one doesn't sound right to me either. Pre-college practically none of the computing I was exposed to personally or via dinner-table talk was Microsoft-based. In all of my "ancient business machine needs love" assignments with NDA the machine in question ran HPUX. The open source movement may be dependent on the internet, but there were plenty of non-Windows machines in service before Windows rose to prominence (along with its marketing).

On the downside to all this, I do think the internet has had a terribly homogenizing effect. Internet BDSM culture for example seems to be pretty thorough about squeezing out any other way to think about kinky life.

[pure-agnostic.livejournal.com]

I'd add: "Governments act to protect their own citizens."

[agent_dani]

I suspect that very much depends on one´s region. For my region, the materials available were heavily slanted toward the supposedly conservative point of view prevalent here (that is, the ¨it´s only bad when it doesn´t benefit me¨ crowd, which is a large portion of the local,) to the point that I wasn´t even aware of publications carrying others until just before internet access became common here, which was well after it became common in many other areas.

[sweh.livejournal.com]

Well before the internet, I was aware of alternate sexualities, different ways of thinking, tolerance etc etc... mostly because of SciFi. Anyone who read Heinlein will have been exposed to those attitudes :-) Even if the situations were fictional, the concepts were relevant.

The internet definitely allowed people to experiment with themselves; being able to communicate with someone thousands of miles away and gain reassurances that you're not nasty, dirty, bad is liberating.

The internet also provided information; eg on safety, techniques, methods. Unfortunately it _also_ provides mis-information. Wikipedia is the culmination of both.

I'm not sure I even agree with some of your comments; some appear to be straw men, and others... "IT department protecting them"... YES, actually! See the number of botnets, viruses, trojans, backdoors all running around because people _don't_ perform "safe computing". My parents have no idea; I've given them gmail, AVG, mozilla... but I can't help it if they hit a bad website (typo error) and say "yes" to any box that appears, and so gets infected. Open source existed before the internet; the Free Software Foundation was formed in 1985. Usenet and mailing lists existed before the internet.

[lonesomepolecat.livejournal.com]

Lie: You only need metric if you live in France.

Reality: 96% (give or take a few) of the worlds population use metric exclusively in their daily lives. The USA is the only major country left that isn't either completely metric or moving towards it with a solid plan (oh, and we're using metric more every day, it's just not as well thought out and cheap to convert as those countries that bothered to have a plan). Also, the US customary system is not the same as the old British Imperial system even though the names are the same so lots of confusion abounds.

Internet Lies

[lines-of-dialog.livejournal.com]

This is a very interesting topic to me...Ideological, value,and ethical formation in people (particularly as it relates to public policy) is fascinating...the thing is that these lies, myths, fabrications, and manipulations have very specific historical and religious origins - long before the Internet...The significance of the Internet is that they now get spread faster and in greater bulk...

Just a thought...