How the Internet Connects Us

Over the last 20 years, the internet has grown and become the biggest sensation in our world today. People all over the world 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 taken over many aspects of our lives, and it continues to grow. 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 everyday lives. However, the internet connects people around the world by providing an engine for us to reach new people, allows us to share more aspects our lives, lets us become closer to others, and

One way the internet connects people around the world is through online relationships; whether it be a friendship or an intimate relationship, studies have shown that these online relationships are particularly strong (McKenna 12). There are so many dating sites out there for people who have a hard time making connections with people in the physical world, so the internet allows them to find these connections online. Aside from dating websites, people can make friendships or romantic relationships on any social media platform. The internet allows these connections to happen by providing a source for people to reach out and meet people that they would have never been able to meet had it not been for the internet. Katelyn Y. A. McKenna, Amie S. Green, and Marci E. J. Gleason, three students at New York University wrote the essay, “Relationship Formation on the Internet: What’s the Big Attraction?, which discusses different aspects of online relationships, 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).

The internet allows people to come together and create all kinds of new things and lets people with similar interests find each other to connect through that similar interest. 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 who 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 were all interested in this same thing, and met up to perform this. Therefore 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). Thus, the internet is connecting people through memes not only online but in a way that gets people connected offline, too.

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. Essentially, distractions from the internet are not something to fear. 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 when we are engaged in conversation with others.

People also argue that the internet takes away face-to-face communication with others. However, 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 not only through messages but by, in a different sense, “face-to-face”. 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. While it may not technically be “face-to-face” since they are not physically with each other, without the internet, one would have no way of seeing another person that is not with them at the moment 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. Whether one wants to look at the positive side and see the connections that are made through the internet rather than the negative, the internet continues to spread and its usage continues to grow, anyway. With that said, we as society should be accepting of the internet to see how we can use it to keep connecting with people in different ways. Furthermore, there are even more social media websites, apps, and platforms that are waiting to come out and will provide even greater expansion on how we can communicate 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.