Why the Internet Is the Greatest Achievement of Any Civilization, Ever | Virginia Heffernan

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Cast off your Luddite gloom. The Internet is simply the greatest thing to ever happen to the world. It incorporates every element of art, culture, and ingenuity, taking humanity to a wholly new era. Heffernan's book is "Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art" (http://goo.gl/Ertv9O).

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Transcript - I see the Internet as the great masterpiece of human civilization, to which we're all contributing all the time the nearly four billion of us with wireless access across the globe. And the reason I call it art is that the building blocks of this enterprise, the Internet, seem obscure, it seems like this must be the tubes or code or a complex surveillance state or operation of various huge tech companies. In fact what we're looking at and interacting with are ancient forms, including text and short form text that for centuries has been known as lyric poetry. And two-dimensional images that bear are a lot of resemblance to frescoes and even cave drawings that we now see the same tropes being resurrected on first Flickr and then Instagram and Snapchat. We see on YouTube we see performance and it music that might have belonged to the ancient Greeks. And, of course, we see music in the form of digitized music, MP3s, Lossless music streaming on title. So it's very difficult to me to see it as not art.

These are exactly the building blocks of civilization, the artifacts that have determined civilization, an increasing civilization. So rather than see us as going to more coarseness and barbarism with the Internet I see this as increasing civility, increasing organization and a natural progress of civilization. Read Full Transcript Here: http://goo.gl/tRX98d.