The Internet at home - a member of the family

So much technical stuff you don’t know and cannot find out from the HELP sites - clues are only found by accident or from friends. So many new words and so many of them are acronyms. OLO - I can just remember that one!

So much constant updating - every few weeks or less it seems, being asked to update some application or other and most of the time with no idea whether it is essential to you or not. I don’t want all this music stuff! Yes you do, I am told, it is vital for your internet downloading or security. And the more updating, the more that some of my older documents and applications become obsolete and inaccessible, despite all the assurances of backward compatibility. I still have workable floppies from 1988 - but even the hardware I used in Scotland in the 1980s no longer exists and the disks are unreadable. Future archaeologists and even libraries in the near future are going to have problems in reading the past, even the recent past.

There comes a point when the world of the Internet does all I want from it - and later updates take away as well as add “unnecessaries”. STAY STILL, INTERNET WORLD! I want to get off here, before I lose too much. I, and possibly many others, do not want my computer and its Internet to be a new world of entertainment-plus, because we live in the real world too. We want a workhorse, not this constantly changing provider of Skypes and twitters and multimedia and multimodes with ipods and mpegs and Blackberries and ever more whatisitimusthavits. Can’t this be possible, and let the entertainment-hungry progressives go where no one has been before if they want to?

But what about energy costs and climate change? Surely we could opt for minimum standbys. My computer system has NINE standby lights when off, and more when on - and many people do leave their systems on permanently. Some of the hardware I have discarded were real fun-for-the-boys, with multi-colour lights flashing and/or revolving as if they were light-houses.

There is very little new I need from the Internet apart from that magic wish of reliability.

Oh, yes, and a truth-marker.

Two sad things that the young have to learn about the world in order to use the Internet is not to trust and not to believe, to an extent far beyond the caution needed to deal with your own real life. Internet banking? I get scores of spam messages purporting to be from my bank - I take refuge by reading none of them. (Telephone banking? The security problems are so severe it took me weeks and far too much private revelation to just get a new cheque book.)

Conspiracy theories? There is at least one about every single thing a child may encounter. It is possible to “prove” that nothing in the world ever happened or is likely to happen. Unlike a book, which is irrevocably and tangibly what it was when first printed, and further editions can be checked from the first, anything on the Internet can change its content and form and who-can-check-it. The past is continually being changed. Young writers, writing about times that I knew - and they do not - re-invent it according to their own world-view.

Every child must learn some basic security and caution going about the real world, But in the virtual world that mistrust must be even greater. Harry Potter books are prescient. Nobody may really be what or who they say they are. People can slag and slander freely. What you buy you may never receive. The only guide to any of the business transactions that are so constantly offered is to train your child, “If you feel your greed instinct rising - keep off it. It is a cheat.”

How sad.

A question, that needs further examination, is the sort of intelligence that is fostered by the Internet, compared with the sort that is fostered by reading books. The one is perhaps more techno and music-oriented, the other more capable of organising and reflecting on knowledge. Yes, non-verbal IQs are rising all over the world. Yes, young people are amazing with technical abilities that flummox their elders. But are they missing out in other aspects essential to functioning IQs in the real world of people, economics and politics?

The Swiss psychologist Piaget investigated how children develop mental schemata about the world. What contrast there must be between the schema of a child reared with a cognitive structure to adjust and accommodate from, as from, say, Arthur Mee’s Children’s Encyclopedia, and one who has picked up whatever resonates to her from TV and surfing the Internet.