Welcome to the dark side

As those of us who have grown up with the Internet have aged and matured, so too has the Internet. For the members of my generation, we have seen the Internet go from being a novelty to a useful tool, ultimately becoming the driving force behind the American economy. All of this while creating a virtual world that we gradually began to inhabit as extensions of ourselves.

But as we have come to enjoy the glowing advances that the Internet has given us over the years--everything from instant messaging to streaming video--we have also come to see its dark side. For instance, the novelty of being able to look up information quickly became tainted early on when the pornography industry began using it to distribute their wares-which has added to exploitation of women and provided an anonymous breeding ground for deviants and stalkers.

The same can be said about the contribution of the Internet to our economy. While the dot com boom of the 1990s drove an already bull market even higher skyward, it did so on empty promises. By the turn of the century, the bubble had burst, turning nearly a decade’s worth of economic growth into a recession.

As people who have grown up with, seen and participated in the changes that the Internet has brought to our society, we have looked past this dark side and invested ourselves further into a rapidly growing digital world.

Social networking sites and the synergy they have created with services like YouTube and Flikr has allowed us to extend ourselves into this virtual world in an incredibly interactive way. Many of us now broadcast our lives online, sharing the moments of our day with friends through status updates and reading their responses to them. We share photos and videos of ourselves while critiquing those of others in real time.

However, we tend to give little thought to the dark side of all of this. More often than not, we are too caught up in the joys of living online to consider how much we are exploiting ourselves. The dark side of this new aspect of the internet can now be counted not in site hits or lost investment dollars but in human lives: a teenage girl hangs herself because of antagonizing wall posts, and killers stalk people online and murder them.

It seems fitting to me that Facebook and MySpace have policies to deal with the remnants of their members’ online lives once they have departed the physical realm. But the fact that they have had to do such a thing points out exactly where we are in our electronic evolution.

As we come to live more online, the online world becomes more and more a part of our actual reality. If this is the case, then the time is soon approaching when we will have to surrender the boundaries between our real lives and our online lives for good.
We have seen the dark side of our society bleed over into this virtual world, and given time, along with our further personal investments into our online personas, the dark side of our day-to-day lives will come along with us into this world.

The Internet is no longer the playground it once was--it has become a part of our life. At this rate, it could very well become our life, and then we must be prepared to both live and die online.