In the internet’s early days, it was an idealistic environment, seen as a forum in which there would be no barriers to communication, where information could be freely shared, and where open-source platforms would proliferate. Given the numerous ills now blamed on the internet, the proliferation of malware, cyber threats, and disinformation, and its ability to affect almost every aspect of modern life, that early-days perspective probably seems hopelessly naïve. It’s certainly true that the internet enables its share of woes and follies, although how much the medium can be blamed for those, rather than the humans involved, is a different question. However, focusing on the negatives can lead us to lose sight of what a boon the internet truly is.
For all that the autodidact is not respected in the modern world (Abraham Lincoln would not be allowed to practice law today, because he taught himself to pass the Bar Exam instead of attending an expensive, prestigious, and lengthy formal program), there has been perhaps no better time in all of human history to pursue that course. A hundred years ago, if I wanted to learn about a new topic, I would have to go to the local library, assuming it was local, and assuming I could access it, and hope that it had books on the topic in which I was interested, and that those books were reasonably up to date. For more current information, I would need to find a way to receive journal papers or some similar media, which would be specialized, and which I might not even know existed in order to subscribe to it. Compare that to the present, when, with a few keystrokes, I can access a torrent of information on nigh any topic imaginable.
Yes, the validity of that information is sometimes questionable. We have to be cautious of incorrect, incomplete, or misleading information, and sometimes what you want to know requires more than one or two searches just to identify the proper terminology to use in your query. Those are minor inconveniences, though, when you consider the sheer profusion of information that is easily and cheaply available at any time to anyone who cares to use it. Just the other week, I decided that I wanted to refresh my MATLAB skills and learn more about deep learning and machine learning. Right on the MATLAB site, I found, for free, 1-2 hour courses to walk you through everything from the program basics to how to use it for signal processing or training a deep neural network. It’s easy to take this kind of material for granted now that it is so ubiquitous, but it is truly extraordinary.
From scientific papers, to coding databases, to free-to-use image galleries, to useful tools and calculators, the internet is an autodidact’s dream. If you think that it is merely a cesspool of complaints and human unpleasantness, then I say that you are looking in the wrong places. Don’t endlessly scroll through a social media feed of people discussing inanities – read the open access papers in Science Advances, or take one of those MATLAB courses to understand what machine learning really is, or read one of the thousands of common domain books available for free from sources like Project Gutenberg. My internet rabbit holes take me from a question about dark matter down to papers on dark photons and an entire, parallel “dark” physics, and I learn something new at every step along the way. I hear people say that the internet is making them less intelligent, and I don’t understand, because the internet is to me a reminder of just how much there is to learn.
To be clear, I am the first person to take precautions against cyber threats and to acknowledge that the internet is as flawed as the society and people which create it. Much of it, perhaps most of it, I ignore or actively avoid, to the point that it sometimes seems that I am accessing a different internet from the one that I hear other people discussing. Simultaneously, it is perhaps the greatest resource for learning, for research, and for innovation ever created. It is for that which I mainly use it, and that is why I like reminders, every now and then, of just how remarkable it is. Next time you’re scrolling mindlessly, pick a topic to go learn about, instead.
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