Internet Usage on Our Lives: A Critique

¶ … Internet Usage on our Lives: A Critique of the Shallows

The pervasive adoption of the Internet continues to completely redefine the nature and scope of people's lives and their ability to communicate and collaborate globally. The Internet is also enabling entirely new approaches to defining methods of co-creation with customers, in addition to the creation and growth of virtual work teams (Panteli, Duncan, 2004). From friends who connect and communicate with one another across continents using Skype over the Internet to the work teams that have developers in the United States, Ukraine, Asia and Australia, the Internet is the common foundation that accelerates communication, shared data, experiences and makes complex tasks accomplishable. Technology is the enabler of greater transparency and trust when used over time to unify people, processes and systems across broad geographic and culture distances (Andriole, 2006). Contrary to this perspective however are the concepts presented in the best-selling book The Shallows, What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains (Carr, 2011). The contrarian views in this book state the Internet is responsible for the balkanization of cultures and the gradual shift to a more insular, closed society where everyone's allegiance to the Internet takes precedence over their willingness to engage in conversations where time is not a constraint or better yet, read deeply in books and savor the insights gained (Carr, 2011). Carr argues that the Internet is also forcing the fabric of society to become addicted to the perpetual updates delivered over the Internet. This view is a skeptical, even cynical view of technology's value.

Communication, Collaboration and Trust

The Internet's value as a platform for communication, collaboration and co-creation of value in products and services, uniting companies and customers, has emerged as the foundation of countless business models (Andriole, 2006). From the strategic aspects of the Internet emerging as a platform for global commerce to the enabling of virtual teams, the one constant across these myriad implementations is the creating and sustaining of trust (Panteli, Duncan, 2004). From the globally recognized brands of Amazon, eBay and others to the broad development networks that Apple, IBM, Google, Microsoft and others rely on to design, develop, sell and support their products and services, the Internet has become the foundation of entirely new approaches to new product development and their introduction (Nolan, Brizland, Macaulay, 2007). The Internet has even made it possible to tailor a specific product or service to the unique needs of a given market that has significantly different cultural and often religious viewpoints, which must be respected for any company or product to succeed globally. In order to accomplish this level of focus, organizations must get beyond the Internet as a mechanism of communication and collaboration to gain insights into the people and in the case of business-to-business (B2B) marketing, the companies they are selling to. The Internet then becomes a catalyst of creating higher levels of trust with a diverse base of customers globally; it can be and is increasingly becoming the antidote for the weakest areas of globalization, namely ethnocentrism (Panteli, Duncan, 2004).

The development of global supply chains, logistics networks, and the continual growth of e-commerce at a strategic level and the exponential growth that Skype at the individual one also highlight how the Internet continues to be an enabler or deeper, more meaningful relationships between organizations and their customers, and between people as well. The growing reliance on the Internet as a means to better connect organizations and people together is also seen in how pervasive virtual teams have become (Panteli, Duncan, 2004). All of these developments are predicated on more open communication and collaboration across organizations and between people with the outcome being greater levels of trust created. If it were not for the Internet as a communication channels, trust would languish, and therefore so would e-commerce and many other relationships that have been galvanized through the use of the technologies supporting the Internet (Nolan, Brizland, Macaulay, 2007). Hardly created a fragmented, short attention span society, the Internet is a catalyst of trust and long-term shared risk and financial gain, in addition to an exceptional communication and collaboration platform as well

Debating The Validity of The Shallows' Arguments

Nicholas Carr has made a career for himself as a curmudgeon, openly speaking about how skeptical he is of the value of Information Technologies (IT) in his first book and now with The Shallows, he has continued to deliver deeper into the concepts he first introduced in an article published debating that Google is making society stupid (Carr, 2011). His contention that the Internet is fueling a highly myopic, inward-centric mentality in people globally, also leading to a very short attention span with people, who seem unable to concentrate in depth on anything of value. At the center of his arguments are that the Internet is also robbing society with the ability to connect at a deeper, more fundamental and trustworthy level as a result of the many gadgets and items that can quickly connect someone to the Internet (Carr, 2011).