That the internet has a damaging impact on society

With this in mind, I believe the internet is becoming increasingly detrimental to society in many ways; physically, mentally and socially.

Firstly, the internet is an incredibly addictive resource which people can become heavily reliant on, at the expense of developing new skills and interests. For example, websites such as reddit or youtube can be used by many in society as a default during boredom, which they may quickly begin relying on as an alternative to sports, socialisation and other more varied activities. Due to overdependence, these tools are likely to lead to boredom in the people using it, when overdone. However, paradoxically they have adapted to solving boredom with the internet, which now causes them boredom, and thus creating a hugely destructive cycle in which the internet users are deprived of fun experiences they could otherwise have been doing, by being unable to escape the cycle of internet dependence. This can be clearly seen in practice, for example people bragging to have spent 2000 hours on­ one game. This also completely halts productivity, as these thing by their very nature cannot exceed the complexity they were designed at, making it unreasonable to develop new ideas while using these internet services. This is a hugely major issue, as it has escalated procrastination enormously which can reduce pass rates in schools and universities, as well as destroy student’s confidence, interest and involvement in the courses they enjoyed. This is clearly shown by statistics, as the percentage of population admitting to being chronic procrastinators has risen to 26% since 2007, a huge increase compared to the 5% in 1978. What has changed? The internet.

Additionally, people are stationary while using the internet. With societies huge reliance on the internet, the extended periods of immobility caused by this heavily contributes to the (first) worlds rapidly increasing levels of obesity, which greatly reduces the quality of life for the overweight people and those that care for them. It also can cause significant increases in medical illnesses, which cost the sufferer time, happiness and potentially their life, as well as costing taxpayers large amounts in increased hospital requirements to treat the unhealthily overweight. This could often be fixed with more activity as a replacement for internet dependence.

Finally, one of the largest problems, in my opinion, is how destructive it is to peoples individuality and ability to create their own opinion, due to the massive amount of social pressure on the internet to adapt to conformities usually manipulated by large companies to their personal gain, as well as the inhibition of true learning caused by the ability to simply ‘look up,’ information in too short of a time frame to learn it. Consequently, people do not learn and recall facts which may be useful in creating an informed opinion for numerous problems, and instead simply accept the information fed through internet sources, which is very often misleading, significantly incomplete or even false. Additionally, the large dependence on the internet creates a perfect opportunity for people to exploit the illusory truth effect, a strategy used my many manipulative figures in the past including Roman Cato, who used this effect to encourage war on Carthage. This greatly hinders people’s confidence in expressing new ideas, especially when in conflict with the already established ideas people are pressured into accepting without reasoning. It is also often significantly harder to gain all perspectives, as less popular opinions can be easily suppressed and hidden...