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Thread: Instant Communication = Gang Rape

  1. #1
    Infested Cats's Avatar Mike Victory
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    Note: I am posting this again, because it had been deleted by VB during his clean-up. Thankfully, I had saved this peice to my harddisk. I Just want to be able to share this (which also happend to be my first post on this forum) with everyone.

    One of the questions that I’ve been pondering lately is, are the benefits of so much instant communication really worth the effects that it has on the world?

    I’m not really sure.

    See, on the one hand we have all kinds of cool stuff going on because of it. The telephone started it, with people able to communicate across the country. Over time as the price came down, people started to get them in their homes. Within a generation it became possible to speak directly to your grandmother who lived in another state, or with the police department to report a prowler, or to talk to the girl in your English class who you could never find the courage to address in person. Between rapid transportation (cars in particular) and the telephone, the world suddenly shrank a lot. It no longer took a week to get a reply from someone by mail; you could just pick up a phone and dial.

    Then along came the television, and we all suddenly were able to see what was going on in other countries. Not just read about it, but actually see in motion, and to experience it almost firsthand. We saw Elvis gyrate and the Beatles wanna hold your hand, we saw Kennedy out talk Nixon, and we saw man land on the Moon.

    But with these great things came the ability to see with our own eyes the effects of war, the dishonesty of politicians, and a constant barrage of reports of local murders and fires and robberies. A lot of our naiveté was stripped from us in one generation. Things that adults used to discuss in the living room after the kids were asleep were on Prime Time, being forced down our throats. Advertisers promised the kids wondrous things which would make them the envy of the neighborhood, which turned out to be cheaply made plastic that cracked the first day. Vietnam was pumped straight into the living room. Watergate was everywhere you turned.

    The innocence that my parents knew as children was already a thing of the past by the time I was born. The Boomers were the last generation to try to cling to idealism, to try to maintain a shred of beauty in what was revealed to be a cold and ugly world. They went to Woodstock, they hung out in San Francisco and thought they could change the world with love, they lived in communes and tried to get back in touch with Nature. Whether they realized it or not, they were trying to regain the innocence. Ask an aging Boomer about Nixon and they’ll stop just short of telling you he had horns and a tail. Why? Because he was just another piece of the process of hardening them. The President is supposed to be an honorable man, the greatest man in the nation, not just another human being who’s prone to corruption like the rest of us. That’s what they really hold against him; that he was just another thrust in the gang rape of their innocence.

    The Internet has taken all of this several quantum levels higher. Now not only do you get the mainstream media telling you just how shitty the world is, but anyone with time and a little knowledge of HTML is an instant publisher. Porn that was only available in seedy little storefronts twenty years ago is now only a few keystrokes away in your living room. Stile now brings us things that I couldn’t even imagine five years ago. Accessing fairly innocuous pages brings up a pop-up advertising a tiny remote camera that you can hook up to your computer, with suggestive pictures of young women smiling at us to show us how easy voyeurism can be.

    We're young at a time when the world is far more cynical and harsh than ever, at a time when if an email is delayed a day it can cause massive chaos at work, when if you don’t have a cell phone and go for a walk people get angry that you were out of contact for an hour. The stress levels have jumped insanely and the societies of the world are really beginning to show it.

    I know that you can’t put the djinn back in the bottle, but that doesn’t mean that we have to blindly accept and like it.

  2. Lounge   -   #2
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    Great post.

    I for one think we need to step back and take a look at what we are doing and figure out just where this will take us.

    Slow down people!

  3. Lounge   -   #3
    Got_brains?'s Avatar Poster
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    Wow... how true.

    Thanks for taking the time to point out to the system admins, and the users, that just when a small tidbit of information/communication goes down, it wrecks havoc.

    Why, look at the last 3 days and see what I mean.

    A small group of people who participate in a small portion of the vast internet start flame wars just because their small section is damaged.

    I am sure that you have had problems before (late homework, late to your job, etc.) and people get upset. Thats exactly what we are doing.

    Technology is a great but terrible thing.





    I am glad you saved that. Thank you.

    -G_B?

  4. Lounge   -   #4
    Ron's Avatar Poster
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    Very true indeed, sorry to say.
    I first started thinking about this several years ago.
    I came back from a 3 week holiday in the Carribean.
    3 weeks of no television, phones, or computers.
    Got back to Belgium, and drove home at about 90km/h instead of my usual 160km/h. Everyone seemed to think I was crazy. Didn't bother me a bit, but slowly, I turned back to the "civilized" world with it's punching clocks, time tables, people hanging to your bumper when you're driving 120 on the left lane, etc.
    No matter how much you'd like for the world to go a little slower now and then, it's not going to happen.
    All you can do is save up as much as you can, and try to get out to some relaxed 'island of tranquility' as much as you can.
    With a bit of luck, you might even think about living there.

    Well,...a man can dream, can't he?

  5. Lounge   -   #5
    chalkmongoose
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    Also, pedophilia has come a hell of a lot easier than in the 1900s, although I guess back then it was sort of accepted... In certain circles at least.
    Now for Christ's sake the internet has provided millions of f'cked up 80 year old perverts who probably got molested as kids with an astounding method of collecting kiddie porn.

  6. Lounge   -   #6
    Wow!

    What a post, that's actually quite scary
    Well done

    Jonno B)
    The idiosyncratic syntax of riddles interests me

  7. Lounge   -   #7
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    I've always thought the same kind of thing, just not as sophisticated

    Its things like that that show the inevitability of Terminator or The Matrix Films...

    Man gets dragged under by work so the machine is created to help lift the weight and stress off our shoulders

    Machines have already replaced people in making cars and packaging on factory lines, soon machines will be replacing humans in more important jobs, giving them the upper hand...The ever increasing AI that is apparent in computer games is just a factor of AI that exsists in the company world...

    No fate but what we make...
    (Sarah Conner in Terminator)

    <span style='color:blue'>Ladies and Gentlemen, John Frusciante</span>

  8. Lounge   -   #8
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    Originally posted by Infested Cats@21 July 2003 - 04:30
    We&#39;re young at a time when the world is far more cynical and harsh than ever, at a time when if an email is delayed a day it can cause massive chaos at work, when if you don’t have a cell phone and go for a walk people get angry that you were out of contact for an hour. The stress levels have jumped insanely and the societies of the world are really beginning to show it.

    I know that you can’t put the djinn back in the bottle, but that doesn’t mean that we have to blindly accept and like it.
    I completely agree with you, IC.

    My question is: do we need all this &#39;fast&#39; stuff?
    - I only pick up my phone when I feel like it, or else let them talk to the answering machine.
    - I had a cell phone for work and threw it away it when I wasn&#39;t obliged anymore - people expected me to be availabe all the time.
    - I don&#39;t have TV, because there&#39;s nothing on besides advertising.
    - I threw out my car some years ago - no more traffic jams and big bills - and now I travel by train, meet nice people (girls ) and see the beauty of the landscape again.
    - I do still listen to the radio all the time, go to the library twice a week, and use the internet a lot, so I&#39;m still well informed.

    What I want to say with this: I think you can still choose how &#39;fast&#39; you live.
    Ofcourse there are a lot of people who call me crazy, but they simply don&#39;t understand.

  9. Lounge   -   #9
    Ron's Avatar Poster
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    Originally posted by chalkmongoose@21 July 2003 - 05:40
    Also, pedophilia has come a hell of a lot easier than in the 1900s, although I guess back then it was sort of accepted... In certain circles at least.
    Now for Christ&#39;s sake the internet has provided millions of f&#39;cked up 80 year old perverts who probably got molested as kids with an astounding method of collecting kiddie porn.
    I don&#39;t want to change the subject, but if the RIAA/MPAA can so easily detect what files we have on our computers, why can&#39;t the cops?
    It&#39;s so easy to just type in a few keywords, and get loads of childporn on the fasttrack network. Finding the IP to those files is just as easy.
    So if I (we) can do it, why can&#39;t the MF cops?

    [/offtopic]

  10. Lounge   -   #10
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    the globalisation of the media and communication markets are to blame for all your woes its true. do the pros out weigh the cons? sorry but thats a far to complex question for me to answer.
    what i will say is that you dont have to buy into it if you dont want to. dont buy a mobile phone, did you cope before you had one? unhook your modem if you dont want an internet connection. Of course, this wont stop the next generation of children becoming desensitized to violence at an early age from watching live war on the news(ratings war anyone)neither will it cure a nation of its unheathy eating habits(i couldnt tell you hhow many mcdonalds have opened up in my city in the last three years) nor could i tell you how many football players have become millionaires and idols to the fans who cant afford to take their families to watch a game.Telephones,television,internet, all links in the chain of globalisation, all there for one reason, yup,£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;£&#036;.
    correct infested dont blindly accept , Question.
    avatar rules are:
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