Response to Lee Siegel "Against the Machine"

The Artificial World We Live In "The Internet"

By: Natalina (Sogang University)

Do you think that there is another world out there? I do think so. There is a world inside this world which is created by human and that is the Internet. Even though it just something that considered to be artificial, but it can connect all the people from all over the world. As we see, these days, people find it awesome to play with the Internet since it offers them so many things. As an example, they can see different people and different countries without needing to across the ocean, but only stare on their computers or Smartphone’s screen. Hence, all of the people have connection of internet to their computer at home or mobile laptop which can be carried with them everywhere they go, like tablets (iPad or Samsung galaxy) and Smartphones. The use of these devices can be viewed from two different sides since everything in this life has its good and bad sides, so does the Internet. 

First, there are so many positive things we get from the Internet. The Internet is a good tool for implementing the idea of freedom of speech, great facility for collecting information, and it is an easy means to build social connection to focus in Information, there is a lot that we can find such as: up-to-date news, entertainment, sometimes helps students to do their assignment. In modern technology where competition is everywhere, information is playing crucial role. For instance, if there is a job opening, people no more use paper to make the announcement instead they prefer to use internet as the mean to make announcement online. If you have no access to the Internet, to their website, then automatically you will have no access to the related information. Therefore, in this very competitive world, information is above all. The search engines like Google, Yahoo, or for most Korean people search engines like Naver and Daum, are the places where you can find variety of information just by typing a key word of the subject that you want to know. You can almost find any type of information and subject that you are looking for. 

Additionally, with the social sites that human being ever created can connect us throughout the world. We can make millions of friends just by using the Internet. With so many great ways for you to keep in touch with them, like email and instant messaging services from Yahoo! Messenger, Skype, MSN. 

However, in contrast of the positive things, the Internet also carries some negative things. For instance, people can steal your personal information such as name, address, credit card number. Because of this kind of thing happened, some people prefer to hide themselves, their identity. As Lee Siegel in his essay The World Is All That Is the Case, he said that for the first time in human history, a person can broadcast his opinions, beliefs, and most intimate thought-“not to mention his face, or any other part of his body”to tens of millions of other people. 

Another best example is people in these days have way more eye contact with their computers, or tablets, or Smartphone’s screen for hours rather than they do with other humans being. As described in the opening discussion of Lee Siegel’s essay, that everyone is sittings speechless in Starbucks. Instead of seeing each other and talking face-to-face, people feel more comfortable talking to each other through the wall on the Internet. It also happened to me several times, when I post something on my Facebook wall, some of my Korean friends comment a lot on that pretend like we know each other very well, but when we meet around at school we don’t even say hi to each other. This is funny but so true. I just don’t get why people should feel way comfortable like that. 

Aside from the example above, I sometimes faced some serious time management problems because I used to be so addicted to surfing the Internet, and I found myself unable to concentrate on my work before me. I sometimes also found the Internet awesome when I have bunch of work to do. I hated it when this happened to me. I always regretted after I spent an awful time on that each day, and I found my sleeping schedule ruined. However, I relieve now, because I’m not that addicted anymore to surfing the Internet. 

In the whole, from the essay of Siegel about the Internet, he is strong on pointing out the problems, but less impending about what he sees as the solutions. However, possibly it's necessary to understand the extent of the problems first before we start solving them. However, I think that the solutions are back to individual, to the people who use the Internet. Since the Internet is just a mean that does’t have brain to think like we do, so we can take good things of it and leave bad things. God gave us beautiful and smart brain, so we should use it very well, not to be a stupid person that easy to be manipulated by the machine.