(List) What the Internet is Killing

The Telegraph recently featured a list of fifty things that are being destroyed by the Internet.  The article is hardly surprising given the massive shifts the Internet brings to society, but it does raise a debate about what will be missed from a bygone era and what will be rightly forgotten.

The list covers the lost art of polite disagreement, various cumbersome fact checking situations and the blackout of news during holidays.  The full list, like the Internet itself, is steeped in disagreements as evidenced by the lengthy comment section, but it’s definitely worth a read through.  Here are five examples from the Telegraph’s project,

2) Fear that you are the only person unmoved by a celebrity’s death
Twitter has become a clearing-house for jokes about dead famous people. Tasteless, but an antidote to the “fans in mourning” mawkishness that otherwise predominates.

12) Letter writing/pen pals
Email is quicker, cheaper and more convenient; receiving a handwritten letter from a friend has become a rare, even nostalgic, pleasure. As a result, formal valedictions like “Yours faithfully” are being replaced by “Best” and “Thanks”.

17) Watching television together
On-demand television, from the iPlayer in Britain to Hulu in the US, allows relatives and colleagues to watch the same programmes at different times, undermining what had been one of the medium’s most attractive cultural appeals – the shared experience. Appointment-to-view television, if it exists at all, seems confined to sport and live reality shows.

27) Knowing telephone numbers off by heart
After typing the digits into your contacts book, you need never look at them again.

44) Trust in Nigerian businessmen and princes
Some gift horses should have their mouths very closely inspected.

Missing from the list is the disappearance of cursive, the need for spelling and on the horizon, print media.  It’s nearly impossible to argue against the progress the Internet has brought without being labeled a Luddite, so we applaud the Telegraph’s attempts to address cultural practices lost in the era of hyper-connectivity.