The Internet is Today’s Tower of Babel
The Bible has a story called “The Tower of Babel”. The story goes that at a point in history, everybody spoke the same language, This enabled everybody to be able to easily communicate with each other and get things done.
So everybody worked together to build a huge tower that was intended to reach up into the sky, but people decided to go one step further and go up to the heavens to make war with God.
So God punished the people by destroying their great tower, causing everybody no longer be able to speak one language, and dispersed the people across many lands.
Around 5000 years has passed since those events took place.
The Internet is today’s Tower of Babel. Everybody is able to communicate with each through a click of the button. You log onto a website like Uptown Pokies, and you do not understand the words, you just click Google Translate and the website is converted into your native language. Problem solved.
Speaking different languages becomes a thing of the past. At first this enabled great improvements in the world. With websites like Wikipedia, people were able to share knowledge that they were not able to share with such ease a generation ago.
It also allowed people to share ideas, work together, and create a great number of useful open source projects.
Applications like Facebook allowed parents and children to communicate more than ever before, even if they were several states away. Even the everyday stuff like not needing to micromanage where your kids are is different today, because a lot of kids have some version of a mobile phone.
And the Flip Side?
But there is also the down side. News that happens across the country or across the world, now seems a lot closer. A generation ago, somebody writes or says something that you do not agree with, you just ignored them. Now we feel as if everything that we say and everything that we do is micromanaged.
It used to be that personal life was personal and business life was business, and as long as you did not bring your personal life to work, your personal life stayed person. But those lines have become blurred.
The more we are able to communicate with each other, the more it seems that we are growing apart. Where there used to be understanding, now seems as if there is just confusion.
I do not know what the right solution is, but it makes you start to think that the Luddites may have been onto something.