Macleans, the bastion of Canadian journalism has published an opinion piece about how The Internet Sucks. Some fairly educated minds are debating it in various places. I anticipate the debate to reach some volume before it dies down; much like posting an article about how Digg sucks and seeing it catapulting to the front page on Digg — I expect an article on how the Internet sucks to soon hit the front page … well, of “the Internet”, I guess.I don’t expect many upcoming articles or opinions to be “for” the piece because the argument is fairly high in “garbage” quotient.

Why?

Because all technology comes with good and bad uses. The reality is that all technology, is in fact value neutral. What we do with it imbues it with “goodness” or “badness”.

So why is it Mr. Maich writes about the Internet being bad? I suspect that human nature being what it is, and journalism reflecting that side of human nature that derives a certain guilty pleasure in every bad thing we hear about, its no wonder that one builds up a certain cynicism for a technology — or, a series of technologies, such as the Internet.

One of Mark Evan’s commenters quite rightly says “we just haven’t developed all the right filters yet” — and he’s right … in a sense. Literally, of course, that’s the whole purpose of search engines; to help us find things that are important. Its also, in the case of Google, the cause of much of the noise.

But I digress. In another sense, I think that the root of Mr. Maich’s article is because there is already a subconscious filter so that we recognize and remember much of what we see, read, and perceive that is negative. In fact, I would argue that it is tremendously easy, cynical and narrow minded to drum up the ills of any new media — television, video games, movies and so on precisely because its in our nature to remember those aspects of it.

The time for the handwringing that usually accompanies the advent of world-changing technology is about ten years too late. The less than favourable aspects of the Internet are all around us, but so are all the positives. Furthermore, I’d like to think the Canadian public is smarter than that. How else to explain the incredible penetration of not even Internet — but high speed access in all of Canada?

So, does teh Internet suck? Well, as much as any other media “teh suck”. Rather than debating the merits of this, I’m wondering how this opinion piece snuck into Macleans in the first place.

Because the article makes Macleans “teh suck”.