Is the Internet Broken? How Technology, Social Media and AI Changed Us

Is the internet broken? What would your answer be? My knee-jerk response, with little to no reflection, is “bloody hell, yes”. Yet giving it a little more thought, I think my response is more likely to be “it’s as broken as you want it to be”. Throughout history, we have had cultural revolution after cultural revolution – and whether our distant ancestors would like us (or vice versa) if we were to somehow meet, we’ll never know. My guess is that they would be bewildered by us, frankly. Yet each new development presented different opportunities to different people. Take literacy – after its development, some wrote poetry while others scribbled graffiti on walls (Pompeii is a great example, where it survived unlike the scrolls the poetry was written upon). Then there was television. The BBC (which made this video) set out to inform and educate the masses, while the commercial channels quickly got the upper hand (viewer wise) by bestowing us with gifts like the soap opera and the…