Opinion to the statement of Andrew Keen that the internet is killing our culture by Sarah Bieri

To speak about the statement of Andrew Keen that the internet is killing our culture, it is important for me to think about how people use the internet. The use of the internet can be devided in three main categories: research, entertainment and connection.
I decided to think about every category separately.
In the entertainment category the internet changed not the entertainment itself because you can listen to music, view movies or play videogames on the computer without the internet. The change is that you can download games, music, et cetera or play, listen online. So the “big“ change is that there is no need to go to a shop to buy a movie as a dvd, something physical but push some keys and download the desired object. So the internet offers easier access without any buisness hours. I am sure, that there will be a solution for the problem of illegal downloads in the future. The author Andrew Keen regrets, that the download-society destroys small independence record and book stores. I don’t think that the internet is the first big enemy for those small stores. When the first megabook-stores opened ten or fifteen years ago everybody said the same. This process of the big fish is eating the small ones exists since the begin of the industrialization.
The category connection is the one where new opportunities were given by the invention of the internet. People are able to write and read almost at the same time. There are many different possibilities to connect with others via internet. Existent connectionforms like the phone are now integrated in the internet. Facebook, personal homepages or blogs are only a few instruments to publish personal things in the internet. It seems that the internet generated the possibility to connect better with the outside world, make more friends and be always informed about everything others are doing. The problem is and will be the time. In my opinion it isn’t possible to share your time with fivehundert “friends“ and know everything about them. Either one decides to share ones time only with those who are really important for oneself or to have hunderts of superficial friendships and be more “lonely“ with the internet than before.
The third category research includes every information you could find in the internet including news. There are more or less profound informations in the internet. So one has to measure if the information is worthful or not. If someone want to go deeper into the material there are libraries, museums, universities and so on where one can find more information.
The problem might be that those who grow up with the internet and cannot remember times without it have problems to find information outside the internet.
So there will be a gap between well educated people who are able to research information they need outside the internet and those who are not prepared for that in school.
Another problem is and will be that demand determines supply. Big Newspapers like the new york times have huge problem with the demand. Mostly all big newspapers publish in the internet for free so fewer people buy the news in paper. Maybe in the future there won’t be any newspapers left because nobody pays for the work. Or the salary is soo bad that only undereducated journalist do the work. User-generated information are nowadays common and will probably increase in the future.
As a kind of solution for me the internet is an instrument and everybody decides for himself how to use it. Maybe it would be a good idea to teach the next generation the options they have with or without the internet.