Let us count the ways the Internet improves our lives.
1. Human rights are protected, and lives are saved. A woman raped in Pakistan, who surely would have been murdered for her crime of being a rape victim, is shielded from further violence and persecution, when the world hears and responds to her story via the Web.
2. Internet communities facilitate friendships and romance. A prospective spouse or hookup can quickly be found via the Internet, in spite of the quip of one cynical critic: “the odds are good, but the goods are odd.”
3. Scientific and scholarly research flourishes via long-distance collaboration.
4. Personal publishing proliferates: just when it seemed as if the crushing power of big print publishing would drown us under commercial propaganda, the Internet arose to give individuals a still small voice.
5. Strange cyberbedfellows unite for action. We can easily connect with like-minded individuals, and mobilize to do good work for the environment, or social and political causes and campaigns.
6. The Internet — along with YouTube, its wildest child — keeps our politicians and public servants a little less dishonest. YouTube may prove to be a terrific deterrent as high-ranking officials realize a simple truth of the digital age, first coined by Uncle Remus: “You can hide de fire, but what you gonna do wid de smoke?”
7. Email — faster than a letter, cheaper than a phone call, able to alert you to new messages with a bingle sound — allows us to effortlessly contact family and friends.
8. Terabytes of information are accessible to almost everyone.
9. The environment can be observed. One game preserve in China is completely monitored by cameras, so that its Giant Pandas can be watched on a website, by a small number of human staff — and experts in many locations — responsible for their survival.
10. Mundane tasks, such as shopping and bill-paying, are simplified — they consume fewer resources and less time.
The perils of using the Internet are no less tremendous than its benefits. [...]
The unexamined online life is not worth living. What we cannot find in caring relationships with other persons, we will never find through the medium of interconnected machines. Goethe, despite his enlightened culture at Weimar — ingeniously designed to nourish its citizens, and promote scientific discoveries and all the arts — needed to constantly remind himself about the simplest things. Remember to live.
