Has the internet shrunken our perception of reality?

A long time ago I believe before we had the internet and before we had the ability to travel long distances by plane I don't think anyone could see any point in wanting to venture out farther beyond the town they lived in. The world seemed like a really vast place in the past. I believe with the introduction of the internet in our lives we have engaged ourselves with the rest of the world through its seemingly endless possibilities for communication and networking yet it has lead us to believe we are closer to other places we've never been to before. At the same token, these places are still really far from our actual location from where we are now, yet they are STILL more farther from us than we realize. It's just that the internet has shrunken our perception-- so-- even when a country is really far away from us-- I think the internet has made it seem like it isn't that far away from us.

The internet has certainly been a major factor in this. You can take a world tour with Google satelite maps or images. Removes much of the mystery and romance.

But it's not only the internet. It's the wider phenomoneon of "globalization" and the globalization of culture. You can buy starbucks and watch Sex in the City in Tibet now. Millions of kids in Sub-Saharan Africa know who Spiderman and Batman are. Within the confines of the first world, the collapse is even more extreme. It sometimes feels that the differences between cities like London, New York, and Tokyo are collapsing so fast as to make these lactions almost identical in many places. The world is being covered with food courts and everyone is wearing Gap T-shirts and rocking out to their iPods.

A long, long time ago..
Way back in the nineteen hundreds..
They used to have these strange things made of this funny stuff called paper.
Many papers were bound together, and were then called pages. Many pages were bound together and put into this rectangular thing called a book. People would sit on a chair under a light, or even lie in bed and read the letters that were printed in these books for hours and hours on end.

It's true !
As far fetched as it seems !

Na we on the pale blue dot www.youtube.com...
looks like the internets has put me in my place,

sorry. I love the internet and if anything ir has helped to expand my consciousness in many ways. Definitely allowed me to access to a variety of information and knowledge. However this is nothing compared to real world knowledge.

I love traveling and going to places that I am not familiar with and getting to know them.
Looking at the eiffele tower on google maps could not compare with drinking a glass of champagne and enjoying a cigarette in france with one of the lovely ladies france has to offer.

The only thing to blame for your limit of the perception of reality is yourself. nothing external is to blame.

reply to post by iiinvision

I didn't say for me. And I'm sure it's effected you. I disagree with you-- you can find out a lot about the real world with the internet-- and it has influenced our perception-- and the fact that you say that it doesn't means that you deny it. Anything that we use or do has an effect on our perception. Music has an effect on our perception, television does, and so does the internet. I wasn't talking about google maps or stuff like that. I'm talking about the level of communication that we get through the internet... I'm sure that the internet has had an effect with how we communicate on yourself... and you can't really deny that.

I actually think the opposite. It has broadened reality, because it allows to learn more about the world then we would if we sat at home.

However, I still feel that traveling the world and learning that way is a must. For example. I can look up ANYTHING online about Russia. However, all the reading I do (books or online) will NEVER EVER compare to my actual visit to Russia. That visit is more reality to me, then reading someone's account.

The person closest to me in real life, lives in a different country. I can listen to his accounts of his country and read all about it - quite realistically - however, until I experience it myself, my reality of it is limited.

The best way to experience reality is to well, experience reality. Get out, travel and learn. But the Internet is an exceptional aide to this.

reply to post by greeneyedleo

I get a lot of information from reality myself. I like reading books, I like going on vacations, I like talking with friends, but I just can't notice how much the internet has changed what we do. It has had an effect on our live. I just think that it really has made us take for granted a lot of the information that we now get from the internet that we didn't have before, hence, which is why I say that the internet has made our perception smaller.

Please excuse my not-fully-formulated thoughts, but I think the OP raises a really interesting question about our perception of the world today.

However this post comes across, I believe that the internet is overall a wonderful and exciting development in human history. At this early point, though (speaking in historical terms) we are still struggling to understand how it can and has changed our relationship to other cultures and how it has not.

I think the internet encourages the false belief that if something looks the same in two different places, it has the same cultural meaning. This in term causes us to believe that we understand more about the world than we actually do. The danger is in assuming that because we can see and read the same things, we will feel and believe the same way about them.