How the Internet Connects Us

Over the last few decades, the internet has grown enormously. We are able to access the internet nowadays through endless amounts of technology ranging from computers and cell phones, to TVs and even kitchen appliances like refrigerators. Granted, the internet has essentially consumed many aspects of our lives, and it continues to develop everyday. It has changed so much of our world already and because of this, the internet has been ridiculed time after time for “disconnecting people” and creating so-called problems in our world. However, the internet connects people around the world by providing an engine for us to seek out those with similar interests to us, provides a new level of comfort to let us become close to others, and overall creates meaningful connections offline as well as online.

One way the internet connects people around the world is through creating online relationships. Whether it be a friendship or an intimate relationship, studies have shown that these online relationships are particularly strong for various reasons (McKenna 12). In one aspect, there are many dating sites out there for people who have a hard time making connections with people in the physical world. By meeting romantic partners online, the internet helps these individuals who have trouble interacting face-to-face with new people, which allows for them to find this intimacy. Furthermore, they eventually can move from the internet to real life where they can feel more comfortable talking to and being with said partner.

Online relationships have a way of creating a closeness with people that one has never even met, which was never able to be done before the internet. Aside from dating websites, people can make friendships or romantic relationships on any social media platform. Social media websites allow these connections to happen by providing a source for people to express themselves and to easily meet new people. It is as simple as pressing a few buttons in order to meet someone new and make a connection with them. One reason it may be so easy to reach out on the internet rather than in real life is due to the anonymity of it. Katelyn Y. A. McKenna, a professor, and her two students, Amie S. Green and Marci E. J. Gleason, at New York University wrote the essay, “Relationship Formation on the Internet: What’s the Big Attraction?”, which discusses different aspects of online relationships. In the essay they state, “There are qualities of internet communication and interaction, such as its greater anonymity, that are known to produce greater intimacy and closeness” (McKenna 9). In other words, with the ability to talk to someone who does not know one’s identity, one feels more comfortable sharing personal details of their lives, which ultimately creates these functioning online relationships.

Another way people create connections through the use of the internet is by easily being able to discover people with similar interests. An example of this is seen in an essay written by Bill Wasik, the deputy editor of The New York Times Magazine. In this essay, “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project”, Wasik discusses how he was able to create the internet sensation of the “flash mob,” where a group of people assemble suddenly in a public place, perform an unusual and seemingly pointless act for a brief time, then quickly disperse, often for the purposes of entertainment, satire, and artistic expression. He created the flash mob simply by sending out messages to random people who then met up to perform this. When Wasik explained his reasoning for starting the flash mob, he stated, “People would see, namely nothing but themselves, coming together for no reason at all.” However, it seems as if there was a reason as to why people would come together to create the flash mob; to make connections with people who share their interests. All of the people who showed up were interested in doing the same thing, therefore they may have felt connected to the other people who also decided to show up. While Wasik may view it differently, essentially, he was able to use the internet to gather a group of people with a similar interest to come together and create something new; a meme.

Memes have connected people in so many different ways since they distribute the same ideas from person to person for everyone to relate to and understand. A meme is defined as “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture” (Wasik 479). Wasik explains this phenomenon in “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project”, by stating, “In a meme’s-eye view of the world, any idea…can be seen as a sort of independent agent loosed into the population, where it travels from mind to mind, burrowing into each, colonizing all as widely and ruthlessly as it can” (Wasik 479). Many memes include a picture and text which is made for humor that people can find relatable. With this, people are engaging over these picture memes and people are able to find similarities between each other through this. People are also able to communicate about these memes from the internet in real life, and Wasik explains this by saying, “What the internet has done to change culture—to create a new, viral culture—is to archive trillions of our communications, to make them linkable, trackable, searchable, quantifiable, so they can serve as a ready grist for yet more conversation” (Wasik 480). This relates to what McKenna discusses in her essay when she states, “The unique structure of the internet allows individuals to easily find others who share specialized interests” (McKenna 11). Both Wasik and McKenna recognize that the internet has a way of connecting people through what they are interested in and furthermore allows people to connect offline as well as online.

Many people worry that the internet has become so much of a distraction for our brains that it is actually isolating us from each other. However, the distractions that are caused by the internet are not necessarily forcing us into isolation because they are creating connections with people. Sam Anderson, a New York Times journalist who argues that the potentially distracting digital world may be beneficial in his, “Defense of Distraction” essay, states that, “The truly wise mind will harness, rather than abandon, the power of distraction.” Anderson believes that internet distractions could actually be beneficial because they allow our brains to keep busy. This relates to Wasik’s, “My Crowd Experiment: The Mob Project” because he talks about how he used the internet to create the flash mob out of boredom; concluding that when we are distracted, it is comes from boredom, not because we are seeking isolation. Overall, distractions from the internet are not something to fear.

However, people still argue that the internet takes away face-to-face communication with others. Yet, if one is in a relationship, whether it be romantic or platonic, with a person that is far away from them, the internet is an incredible tool that allows them to keep in touch and communicate. This is done not only through messages but by, in a different sense, “face-to-face” interaction. There are many different ways people who are far apart can still see each other via the internet: FaceTime, Skype, Snapchat; and these video and picture technologies help to maintain these relationships despite the distance between the people, thus strengthening the relationship. While they are not physically with each other, without the internet, one would have no way of seeing another person that is not physically with them, at all. Therefore, the internet connects people by allowing them to see each other even when they are not together.

The dispute over whether the internet is beneficial and connects our world or if it is harmful and disconnects our world has been an argument for years now. Nonetheless, the internet remains making strong connections between people by allowing for people to reach out to others they normally would not, and creating a platform where those with similar interests can interact. Whether one wants to look at these connections that are made through the internet or not, the internet continues to advance and its usage keeps growing. With that said, we should be accepting of the internet as a tool for forming communication in order to see how we can use it to keep connecting with people in different ways. Furthermore, there are even more social media websites, applications, and platforms that are waiting to come out and will provide even greater expansion on how we can relate with others around the world. As the internet keeps developing, we do too, and we can only expect these connections to keep growing, as well.