{"id":3523,"date":"2011-03-07T12:06:57","date_gmt":"2011-03-07T17:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.theoreti.ca\/?p=3523"},"modified":"2011-03-07T12:06:57","modified_gmt":"2011-03-07T17:06:57","slug":"the-battle-for-control-%e2%80%94-what-people-who-worry-about-the-internet-are-really-worried-about","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3523","title":{"rendered":"The Battle for Control \u2014 What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about <a href=\"http:\/\/scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org\/2011\/03\/02\/the-battle-for-control-what-people-who-worry-about-the-internet-are-really-worried-about\/?utm_source=feedburner&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=Feed%3A+ScholarlyKitchen+%28The+Scholarly+Kitchen%29\">The Battle for Control \u2014 What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About<\/a>. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick&#8217;s nice essay &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.newyorker.com\/arts\/critics\/atlarge\/2011\/02\/14\/110214crat_atlarge_gopnik?currentPage=all\">The Information; How the Internet gets inside us<\/a>&#8221; in the New Yorker that divides us into three groups,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>. . . the Never-Betters, the Better-Nevers, and the  Ever-Wasers. The   Never-Betters believe that we\u2019re on the brink of a new  utopia, where   information will be free and democratic. . . . The  Better-Nevers think  that we would have been better off  if the whole  thing had never  happened, that . . . books and magazines create private space for minds  in ways  that  twenty-second bursts of information don\u2019t. The  Ever-Wasers insist  that  at any moment in modernity something like this  is going on, and  that a  new way of organizing data and connecting  users is always  thrilling to  some and chilling to others.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Kent then turns historical looking at both the infoglut trope over time and then, in an original move, he looks at what some of the originators of the Internet thought it would be. He ends by concluding that it is really about control,<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>We may argue again and again whether the Internet is changing our  brains, elevating us, lowering us, making us smarter, or making us  stupid. But at the end of the day, it seems the real argument is about  control \u2014 who has it, who shares it, and who wants it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From Humanist a pointer to a great blog essay by Kent Anderson about The Battle for Control \u2014 What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About. The essay starts by talking about all arguments for an against the internet making us smarter or stupider. He quotes Adam Gopnick&#8217;s nice essay &#8220;The Information; &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=3523\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">The Battle for Control \u2014 What People Who Worry About the Internet Are Really Worried About<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,18,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-internet-culture-and-technology","category-philosophy-of-computing","category-social-networking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3523"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3524,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3523\/revisions\/3524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}