10 lessons I learned from Ralph breaks the internet

The Internet is a big city, as Google and Amazon are giant buildings with colorful signs. Where you take six steps for someone to suggest a product, a service, the opportunity to earn good money. Unwanted emails (Spam) share space with vehicles that carry data from one place to another at many megabytes per second. And if you have any doubts about which direction to take, just ask the search engine for help, a little character with glasses trying to guess what you mean.

The search engine is represented by a nice character who tries to guess what the users are looking for.

Any resemblance to what you find on the internet is not a coincidence. This is how the movie "Wifi Ralph: Breaking the Internet" portrays the connected world and everything around it.

Ralph, the decadent villain of a game from the 1980s, continues to play a prominent role. But now, instead of invading other arcade games, Ralph will end up on the world wide web, accompanied by Vanellope von Schweetz, the mistake posed as the official character of a racing game. The film addresses the boundaries of Ralph and Vanellope's friendship, but the backdrop is the couple's solutions to dealing with many unexpected aspects of the internet, from the way data travels over the web to dark corners from the "Deep web"

Therefore, the film can help Internet users to understand how the network works and how it shapes the behavior of people, even the behavior of those outside of it.

In the internet universe posed by the movie, for example, not even Disney princesses escape and end up at the ball. So today I want to share with you the 10 lessons that can be learned with "Wifi Ralph: Breaking the Internet"

1) The Internet is not born from air

You turn on your phone or computer, turn on your wifi and you are ready to surf. Nothing is further from reality. In short, everything that is sent over the Internet first passes through a modem, from there it travels through a cable hung on the street poles and finally reaches the Server, which would be like the "Internet base". Ralph and Vanellope made that trip. Not funny at all, but at least they did it really fast!

2) Language is another; Are you fluent in "meme language"?

English? Portuguese? Nothing of that. If you are on the Internet, the native language is another. You must be fluent in memes. Yes!, the characters in "WiFi Ralph" constantly throw meme.

3) Nothing is forever

Download speed doesn't just increase exponentially with every connection technology update. On the Internet, too, there is the speed with which services are obsolete. Do you remember the dial-up connection or Dual up? In the 1990s, most communications were done this way. How was a landline, if you were talking to someone on the phone, and suddenly someone else called you, that person was on the "line" with the "busy" signal. What about geocities? It was a service of "hosting" of web sites that grouped the pages by cities. Although widely popular, these services were run over by more modern ones. The memory of what they were is not erased at all and according to the movie, on the Internet, there is even a small place for them. However, it is not a pretty place.

4) Algorithms define what you see ?: Yes

They decide what is the next video to be shown on YouTube, the next song to be played on Spotify, the next post on your Facebook. Algorithms are this sequence of codes that tries to keep up with each step you take in a service in order to know more about you than you imagine. Only they are not alone in this. Once they manage to determine your profile, they will not stop trying to please you: give you what you like the most over and over again. At WiFi Ralph, Yesss is the embodiment of an algorithm, and she only thinks about one thing: what will the new trend be!

5) the Internet is divided into bubbles

We cannot hold Facebook responsible for this. Long before the social network algorithm was accused of further intensifying political discussions and creating closed bubbles in which topics are replicated, the Internet already had exclusive corners for members of particular tribes. There are some in the movie, like the tribe of gamers and Disney princess lovers, but you may have already come across groups like this on the net (Facebook has realized the potential in this niche, and since 2019 that is promoting the tool to create and spread groups within the page)

6) You can earn money, but ...

“Earn money without leaving home. Ask me how ”. You may have already come across advertisements like this on the internet. It's not hard to imagine how easy and attractive easy money online advertising is. The movie shows some ways to earn money without leaving home or the web, but it is not easy at all. Finding rare items in resale games may sound like fun, but it takes hours and hours of dedication. Becoming a digital "influencer" to turn video likes into money requires embarking on whatever fad comes along, from eating pepper to escaping African bees.

7) Never read the comments!

This lesson was explicitly stated in the film. "Internet rule number one: never read comments," Yesss tells to Ralph after he ... He read the comments they left on his channel on BuzzTube, the video service that replicates YouTube in the movie. And for those who still don't understand, the algorithm continues: "People can show the worst of them here." Was it clear to you?

8) Smartphones rule everything

Although it was computers that brought the internet into people's homes, it was smartphones that made the web invade every aspect of our daily lives. And it is not too difficult to think why this happened: Are you going to tell me that you wait all day to get home and respond to WhatsApp messages? During the movie, Ralph and Vanellope communicate through a smartphone that makes holographic video calls; well, this last part is still science fiction, but some are already working to bring this technology to cell phones.

9) Beware of the "deep web"

The Internet has corners where Google doesn't even go. The deep web is a shady place on the web that search engines don't go to: there are pages that are not crawled. Not everything there is bad, but being out of sight, it is a region of the internet where pages of drug, weapons, prostitution, etc. reside. As well as hiring illegal services, as for example in the movie, where it shows how it is possible to hire malicious programs in order to destroy a person's life. There the danger is not at all virtual!

10) Who watches over the children?

It is not uncommon to see a child with his eyes glued to a cell phone screen while his mom or dad are busy. "WiFi Ralph" makes fun of this situation: Ralph invades one of those games where you have to feed a virtual pet. It's a joke, but that scene can turn into a real-life nightmare - what if it was someone bad? The prevention of major trauma requires the best antivirus for children: the presence of parents or guardians at all times while the minor is online

If you have not seen the movie yet, I recommend that you do so, if you liked this post, I would appreciate it if you shared it among your contacts.