Week 12 - Net Smart

I'd like to begin this week's reflection by saying that I think this is one of the most important books we've read so far. Howard Rheingold's text is a dense research-filled tome about the various personal, social, psychological and societal impacts of our use of the Internet. His goal is to lay out for us the ways we might become more effective users and participants in the net-saturated world.

People used to say things like "get ready, because soon technology will be all around us." Well, I feel strongly that it's time to put adages like that behind us. That time is already here. I'm typing this reflection into a self-publishing platform called blogger, one of the earliest blog platforms that's still going strong at 17 years old -  an impressive pedigree for any Internet medium. If Blogger were one of my students, it would be old enough to take its driver's test. As I type this I'm using a Smartphone app called Grubhub to order Chinese takeout delivered to my house. At the same time I'm sending a video message to a friend via snapchat, responding to another friend's "like" of a photo I posted on Instagram, replying to emails about work and school, scrolling through Facebook, and buying a Christmas gift for my mom via Amazon.com.

The brave new world is here. Web apps are no longer an ancillary accessory. They're real ways that people conduct social interaction and arrange their lives. Services like Instacart and Fresh Direct allow people to order groceries online. Map services like Google maps and Waze help people find the best driving routes every single day, whilst collecting location data from millions of mobile devices. According to PEW, The number of people using dating sites or apps have tripled since 2013. A staggering number of our goals and needs can be satisfied online. If it's not clear enough to you already, those who proclaim "the future is coming" probably haven't adopted it yet. They don't know it's already here.

People around my age (I was born during the Reagan administration) are in a unique position. We can remember the time when not every house had Wi-fi. We remember the days before smart phones, when, in order to talk to a girl you liked, you had to call a landline phone and first talk to her parents (scary!). We remember playing Oregon Trail on a quaint green-screen Apple IIe. In short, we remember the days before the net took over. Younger people, our students for example, don't remember those days. They won't know like we do the difference between online and offline, because those two are blurring. The young ones code switch without realizing they're doing it.

This is why I think everyone, not just educators, should read Rheingold's book. He hits on some of the most critical aspects of our use of the Internet. He addresses our attention deficit, and the importance of filtering out useless, biased and extraneous information so that we can be productive online. He discusses the power of participation and the ways people sustain the participatory ecosystem that the Internet has become. He instructs us on how to train our "crap detectors" in order to avoid being duped by the gigabytes of false and misleading information out there. He acknowledges the power of using online social networks (to get a job, for instance), and he challenges formerly held assumptions that the web is making us dumber (21st century people need different skills, and use different parts of our brains than our cavemen ancestors). The detection, filter and focus skills are important to anyone. There is a wealth of good that a wireless world can do, but those wading in unprepared can find themselves in the deep end pretty quickly. Adults and kids need the skills Rheingold lays out in order to stay safe and to be effective, focused and responsible members of the growing global virtual community.