Is the Internet Good or Evil?

We have been warned of the dangers in the internet. There are threats that range from merely wasting our time to degrading our very souls. In the most extreme sense, there is a very real issue of the internet destroying lives. All these troubles and concerns can at times consume our perspective, and we might come to see this technology solely as our enemy. When in such quandaries it is important to not forget the good that these resources also make available to us today. By that I do not mean just the trivial matters of convenience we gain; that alone would not justify the cost. Such an amazing transfer of information has a power to save men from ignorance and mistake, to propagate good ideas, and to bring together worthwhile collaborations*. It may be that the internet has been allowed to remain on this earth because its potential to save the lives and souls of mankind outweighs its own threat to destroy them. The burden is on us to ensure that that potential is not being squandered.

*https://www.lds.org/ensign/1984/06/the-church-and-computers-using-tools-the-lord-has-provided?lang=eng

Not All Play by the Same Rules-Book Report

People have interesting ideas about digital networks. They want their personal profiles to be protected. They don't want their credit card numbers sold, their personal files hacked, or their identities stolen. When exchanging personal information online, they expect the website to meet certain standards of encryption to prevent the data from being stolen. When information does get stolen, they expect the vendor to have resources and obligations to compensate and restore them back to their original state. Now the only way for these things to be secured is through structure. There have to be rules, there have to be ways of monitoring whether those rules are being followed, and there have to be ways to respond to infringements of them. These rules and the enforcement of them designate an implied government.
At the same time, though, people often want the internet to be an anarchy. They want the internet to be where they say what they want to say, show what they want to show, and do what they want to do...even if those things are not always legal in the physical environment. The idea of some authoritative police moderating that self-freedom is repulsive. When legislation like SOPA or PIPA is proposed some legitimately express concern over unintended consequences, however I have noticed a great amount of hostility simply at the idea of government involvement of any sort.
Perhaps there is a logical explanation to these two very real desires that seem to be at odds with one another. It might just be preservation of self-interest. It appears that people are fiercely in support of the measures that protect them, and fiercely opposed to the measures that protect others from them. People don't want their credit cards stolen, but they also don't want to stop their illegal torrenting.

Proper Abstraction

For a society to continually progress, it seems necessary that there be an abstraction that allows lower-level knowledge to be dismissed, otherwise we will eventually spend our entire lifetimes learning all that was previously learned by past generations with no time for new discoveries. Herein is a conundrum, though, as times may arise where that lower-level knowledge was critical but is now lost, a concern explored by Nicholas Carr's recently released book The Glass Cage*. Are we to run the risk of building on a foundation that all of us have forgotten the structure of, or are we to live without ever progressing as doing so would require losing something else? It seems obvious that society has chosen to progress and abstract, and can only be expected to continue to do so. Perhaps that doesn't have to be a doomed journey, though. By knowing what the danger is, we have the opportunity now to assess it and accommodate for it. We may yet learn how to forget safely.

*http://www.kansascity.com/ entertainment/books/article2436204.html

The Future is Divined from Our Needs

In 1947 Archibald Bennett, an LDS Church Genealogist, predicted that "A universal system of intelligent cooperation will bring together on one record sheet every fact in existence regarding a particular family."* One might say that he "saw our day". I don't feel his predicting the future, though, means that he had to have a specific vision of our smart phones, computers, and internet. In fact his language suggests that he spoke not of the technology of mankind, but of very human nature. To know the future of mankind it is enough to be intimately aware of what mankind's needs are. Just understanding that there was an innate need for man to seek out his progenitors and seal his ties to them is sufficient to know that some way will arise to accomplish this. As we understand our nature, we will know what the future will be because we will know what it needs to be.

*https://www.lds. org/ensign/2010/12/future-of-familysearchorg-explained-at-seminar?lang=eng