Exaggerated Importance of the Internet is a Danger for Saving the World's Poor from Coronavirus
It seems yesterday that mainstream media was arguing about the supposed danger of "internet addiction" as kids and adults alike are foregoing real-world relationships in favor of spending more time in front of a screen, building virtual communities via video games and social media. psychological issues were highlighted in the discussion, with experts fearing a greater prevalence of cyberbullying on online forums, social isolation through the loss of ability to form real-world emotional bonds with people, and competitive showing off through falsified Instagram shots leading to suicides and mentally scarring a generation.
And the fear of internet addiction was certainly not just limited to the realm of psychology. The growing dependence of the general public on the convenience of having goods and services delivered to their doorsteps after pressing a few buttons on a website or an app was an existential threat to the boom of real-world commercial zones. Main Street was supposed to become littered with shuttered retail outlets as people find it no longer necessary to head out of their homes to purchase whatever they need to go about their daily lives.
For such experts, lockdown and social distancing measures are supposed to accelerate the trends of increasing internet addiction. After all, the logic goes, if people are addicted to staying at home and be on the computer all day anyway, it is fair to assume that the behavior will be even more entrenched if the media and government authorities convince them that the real world is indeed dangerous and they are correct, from a public health perspective, to stay home and do all they need to do in front of a computer screen. Their past reluctance to step outside would have been vindicated.
Yet, the continuation of the coronavirus epidemic has taken the discussion of the correlation between mental health and the internet in a completely opposite direction. Instead of COVID-19 reinforcing the fear that internet addiction will become entrenched, experts now speak of the mental stress that comes along with people staying at home for too long. The rhetoric comes together with worries about working from blurring the lines between private homes and the workplace, making it difficult for normal people stuck at home to create a healthy balance between hours in work and outside of it.
The economic arguments against internet dependence are also coming to the fore. While the past has seen quiet acceptance that online retailers will prosper at the expense of collapsing mom-and-pop shops, the pandemic has brought the hard truth that the power of the online economy is highly limited, with vast swaths of people around the world still dependent on making needs meet by working on the streets in close range of other people. The rise of giant etailers and other online services providers have not been able to save these vulnerable offline workers from the epidemic in a systematic way.
The renewed realization that the online world is not a replacement for the real world, from both a psychological and economic perspective, puts a serious damper on the narrative, for the past few years, that the internet is and will continue to be central for a modern economy. While there is no doubt that technology firms and implementation of technology in more traditional ones are necessary and are bound to continue, the idea that most people are bound to it emotionally and financially, at least at the moment, is an exaggerated statement.
Hence, to alleviate the threat of hundreds of millions, especially the poor who have little room to work from home and socially distance, automatically looking to the internet as the solution is not the right approach. For people who do not have ready access to internet infrastructure, and cannot be armed with the knowledge of how to use the internet in a short period through education or experience, ensuring livelihood in the era of COVID019 still need to come from the offline world, not the online one. But focusing so much on online tools such as Zoom, Amazon, or Uber Eats, people forget that hundreds of millions cannot simply be plugged into these platforms immediately.
As COVID-19 subsides in the developed world and the burden of fighting the virus shifts to the developing one, the need to look beyond the internet to help people survive in the post-epidemic "new normal" will be even more relevant and urgent. Coronavirus showed that only a small proportion of the human population and economy were truly ready to benefit from the internet as it stands today and the most vulnerable remain squarely outside of the online world. Now that those vulnerable populations are faced with the danger of the epidemic head-on, the internet should be deemphasized as the go-to solution to keep people living and working.
And the fear of internet addiction was certainly not just limited to the realm of psychology. The growing dependence of the general public on the convenience of having goods and services delivered to their doorsteps after pressing a few buttons on a website or an app was an existential threat to the boom of real-world commercial zones. Main Street was supposed to become littered with shuttered retail outlets as people find it no longer necessary to head out of their homes to purchase whatever they need to go about their daily lives.
For such experts, lockdown and social distancing measures are supposed to accelerate the trends of increasing internet addiction. After all, the logic goes, if people are addicted to staying at home and be on the computer all day anyway, it is fair to assume that the behavior will be even more entrenched if the media and government authorities convince them that the real world is indeed dangerous and they are correct, from a public health perspective, to stay home and do all they need to do in front of a computer screen. Their past reluctance to step outside would have been vindicated.
Yet, the continuation of the coronavirus epidemic has taken the discussion of the correlation between mental health and the internet in a completely opposite direction. Instead of COVID-19 reinforcing the fear that internet addiction will become entrenched, experts now speak of the mental stress that comes along with people staying at home for too long. The rhetoric comes together with worries about working from blurring the lines between private homes and the workplace, making it difficult for normal people stuck at home to create a healthy balance between hours in work and outside of it.
The economic arguments against internet dependence are also coming to the fore. While the past has seen quiet acceptance that online retailers will prosper at the expense of collapsing mom-and-pop shops, the pandemic has brought the hard truth that the power of the online economy is highly limited, with vast swaths of people around the world still dependent on making needs meet by working on the streets in close range of other people. The rise of giant etailers and other online services providers have not been able to save these vulnerable offline workers from the epidemic in a systematic way.
The renewed realization that the online world is not a replacement for the real world, from both a psychological and economic perspective, puts a serious damper on the narrative, for the past few years, that the internet is and will continue to be central for a modern economy. While there is no doubt that technology firms and implementation of technology in more traditional ones are necessary and are bound to continue, the idea that most people are bound to it emotionally and financially, at least at the moment, is an exaggerated statement.
Hence, to alleviate the threat of hundreds of millions, especially the poor who have little room to work from home and socially distance, automatically looking to the internet as the solution is not the right approach. For people who do not have ready access to internet infrastructure, and cannot be armed with the knowledge of how to use the internet in a short period through education or experience, ensuring livelihood in the era of COVID019 still need to come from the offline world, not the online one. But focusing so much on online tools such as Zoom, Amazon, or Uber Eats, people forget that hundreds of millions cannot simply be plugged into these platforms immediately.
As COVID-19 subsides in the developed world and the burden of fighting the virus shifts to the developing one, the need to look beyond the internet to help people survive in the post-epidemic "new normal" will be even more relevant and urgent. Coronavirus showed that only a small proportion of the human population and economy were truly ready to benefit from the internet as it stands today and the most vulnerable remain squarely outside of the online world. Now that those vulnerable populations are faced with the danger of the epidemic head-on, the internet should be deemphasized as the go-to solution to keep people living and working.
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