
How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet (1999) - ciprian_craciun
https://douglasadams.com/dna/19990901-00-a.html
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ciprian_craciun
Although the article is quite old (1999, one year before Douglas Adams died) I
still find it refreshingly up-to-date.

In fact I found a paragraph that was true then and I believe is even more true
now:

<< Because the Internet is so new we still don't really understand what it is.
We mistake it for a type of publishing or broadcasting, because that's what
we're used to. So people complain that there's a lot of rubbish online, or
that it's dominated by Americans, or that you can't necessarily trust what you
read on the web. Imagine trying to apply any of those criticisms to what you
hear on the telephone. Of course you can't "trust" what people tell you on the
web anymore than you can "trust" what people tell you on megaphones, postcards
or in restaurants. Working out the social politics of who you can trust and
why is, quite literally, what a very large part of our brain has evolved to
do. [...] >>

And, two others that I personally resonate with:

<< Another problem with the net is that it's still "technology", and
"technology", as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is
"stuff that doesn't work yet." We no longer think of chairs as technology, we
just think of them as chairs. >> [As a personal note, I think our current
internet is still "technology" by this definition...]

<< 3) anything that gets invented after you're thirty is against the natural
order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it
until it's been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be
alright really. >>

I'm glad I've stumbled over Douglas Adams site... I just hope it won't "bit-
rot" like many other old sites... (Granted it can still be accessed through
the Internet Archive.)

