Omniscient, omnipresent, jealous and vindictive. Sound like anyone you know?

Yes, that’s right, the internet. It is everywhere and it is nowhere. Don’t believe me? Ok, genius, you point to where it is. It sees everything, it hears everything, it is awesome in the Biblical sense, and sweet jebus, do not piss it off; it is a vengeful god. In one way or another, the internet punishes all sins, especially hubris. You think you can just make a racist joke or go out without underwear or pass out in your friend’s car, no harm done? Think again, my friend.

We all pray to the internet. You’re doing it right now. So am I. I’m IMing while writing this. There is no way you’re getting my full attention. No one gets that while the computer is on. You’re not that special. My attention is given to the internet.

I didn’t think there were temples to the internet, and then I went to the Mac store. Talk about a cathedral. I don’t really like Mac products, but I don’t like what other churches hawk either, and as tourist destinations, both kinds are great.

But what would a deity be without priests? Even the most powerful Maker needs a few mortals to spread the word and edit the user manual. From ancient Greece, through the Dark Ages, and into our IT departments, it is these cloistered, celibate few who have sacrificed so much to help us worship and save our souls. Sure, we thank them sometimes, we tithe in our own ways, but we never realize how much we truly owe them until we’re on the phone to tech support in god knows where at 4am trying desperately to get back online to save ourselves from the pure hell of being disconnected.

Remember the day the Blackberries went out? Of course you do. You remember exactly where you were when you realized the gravity of the situation. Did you see the person holding the analog sign reading “The End Is Here - REPENT!”? That was me. Turns out it wasn’t quite the end, but I stand by the message. In war and Berry-blackouts, there are no atheists.

And to all those who would claim the internet is an extension of themselves I say “Fie, blasphemers!” The internet is way better than you and you know it. We are only barely worthy enough to worship at the internet’s feet. And maybe edit a Wikipedia entry if it’s on a topic we studied for our major in college even though we knew at the time it would never come in handy in our careers. Maybe.

In the name of the Gates and the Jobs and the holy ghost, AIMen.

The Internet

The internet is often described as a Thing; monolithic, objectively defined, and referring to something that can be universally understood by anyone hearing the word. Just like “cyberspace” or “information superhighway”, or “love” for that matter, “internet” itself is just a stand-in, a word that refers to whatever I have in mind when I say it, and which may or may not actually translate to something similar for someone else. At its real root, the internet is just a network made up of networks, a framework upon which people have a lot of freedom to hang lots of different kinds of information and interaction. Most of that stuff is completely uninteresting to me.

So, when I think of the internet as “part of me”, or at least part of my sphere of influence, I think of things like
Reference: Wikipedia, howstuffworks.com, snopes.com.
Interaction: MySpace, email, various blogs and Yahoo groups, and instant messengers
Entertainment: onion.com, thismodernworld.com, youtube.com
News: nytimes.com, workingforchange.com

Becomining a Part of Who I Am?

These are all things that fulfill needs I already had, like curiosity, a desire for human communication and boredom. The fact that I’m meeting these needs on the internet instead of at the library, or on TV, or in the newspaper, or what have you, doesn’t mean these are brand new needs. The early hominid that ate fruit because it was sweet, then evolved into a species that refines glucose to the point that it has little nutritional value anymore would understand this. At least, the evolved human knows what I mean.

Who I am is not defined by any one part of me. I would argue that it’s not even defined by all the parts of me. Rather, I am an emergent property of all of my talents and emotions, along with whatever I’ve picked up along the way; a composite identity. And let’s keep in mind that I mostly won’t pick anything up along the way unless it’s something that fits with the me that’s already there, choosing this sort of thing.

Obvious exceptions to this tendency include parts of me that change with time, possibly for the worse. Addictions are usually like that, starting out as a positive and staying around because of loopholes in my personality they’ve exploited. Few decide to become addicted, but it happens regardless. Often slowly, creeping into my personality in a demure and inoffensive manner, these things are handy, pleasant, or easy.

Handy, pleasant and easy: Hmm, now that I say it that way, ir sounds just like the internet. Okay, maybe the ‘net is sneaking into me without my direct knowledge. And maybe I can’t tell when it’s gone too far. Is there a “new me” that has shown up since I integrated the internet into my thinking? I don’t think so, but I’ve heard junkies that steal from their parents for drugs say likewise. If the me that’s typing this is a new one, at least I have all my old stuff.

Does the New Me Like It?

I don’t think there was a “new me” when I learned to talk, or to read, or to drive. Likewise, the internet hasn’t made any “dot oh” version changes either. Maintenance releases, feature packs, bug fixes? Maybe.

But I’ll tell you this: I do like it. I love being able to look virtually any bit of trivia up at any hour, instantaneously. I love that people with specific and obscure interests can find friends across the world that share them. I love that people who want to show off in whatever way they do, can, and that people who want to watch random people show off can lurk and watch without any fear. I love that there is so much freedom online right now that anyone can be anyone and do anything. That’s all great, and I take advantage of a lot of it as much as I can.

So I guess the new me likes it. And I guess I’m okay with there possibly being a new me that’s involved with my internet usage. I can see it becoming more a part of me, as it becomes more a part of the world I live in; that’s part of the pressure to get broadband at home. I can see it becoming too much a part of me; that’s part of the reason I still don’t have broadband at home. As long as I am mindful of the part the internet plays in my life, as long as I am as vigilant as I can be against unwanted intrusion into my life, As long as I believe these things anyway, I am happy with the place the internet has taken in my life. And who said the old me was so great anyway?

Epilogue

The only reason this is even a question is because we, all of us, happen to be here when the internet showed up and offered us all these options. My grandparents’ generation is not even interested in answering a question like the one Kynthia posed, mostly because they don’t understand it (the question as well as, arguably, the internet itself). Our children will grow up with such increasing connection with the internet that this question will again be meaningless. Do any of us ask a question like “Is driving cars a part of me?” Well, perhaps we should. I’ll leave that for another essay.

The Internet has invaded many of my daily routines, insinuating itself into countless mundane tasks that I used to be capable of performing without relying on the Web’s convenience and succumbing to its impersonal nature. I check the weather forecast online every morning, instead of turning on The Weather Channel or tuning in to the radio like I used to do. When I need driving directions, I surf over to Google Maps rather than asking someone familiar with my destination, fetching my atlas, or unfolding a map. I’ve recycled my phone books, because it is usually easier to look someone up at www.whitepages.com than to go hunting through the house for the directory. I’ve hung on to my dictionary, but I consult www.dictionary.com much more often than I crack open its dusty cover. I email my mom once or twice a week instead of calling home. I chat with my friends on Google Talk while I’m multi-tasking, regrettably never giving them my full attention.

This careless tendency to substitute sporadic, superficial virtual interaction for meaningful time spent together with the people I care about is the most pernicious aspect of the Internet becoming a vital mode of communication and socializing that is replacing more time consuming, more personal forms. I rarely call my friends “just because” anymore or plan ahead to meet them for an evening out. Instead, I wait for someone to appear online, Instant Message them, and expect them to be available immediately, or I attempt to organize a last-minute get-together by initiating a volley of one-liner emails that could have been prevented by a single, simple real-time conversation.

Most of my peers consider letter writing quaint and old fashioned; indeed, the only people with whom I correspond regularly these days are my grandmothers. A card from Grandma means more to me than reconnecting with school chums on Classmates.com or having my profile discovered by childhood friends on Facebook ever could. I cherish and save her letters, along with college correspondence exchanged with a friend while he traveled the world on Semester at Sea and the mail I received during the AmeriCorps year I spent unplugged from technology. I collect personal email messages also, carefully archiving them, but I rarely revisit those. Truth be told, the most satisfying reason I’ve found for saving them is to enjoy deleting ex-boyfriends’ folders after we part ways.

Another distressing facet of the Internet becoming a part of who I am is that it has added confusing and probably contradictory layers of online personae to my core personality. My admittedly dry sense of humor does not necessarily translate well from verbal delivery - with accompanying facial expressions, tone of voice, and gestures - to online b-boards, where I am unknown to many community members except by my written words. On one b-board, however, my username is my real name and I have met many of the other members: we all participate in a local sports league. Because of the rule forbidding anonymity among registered users, I make an extra effort to proofread my posts and to think twice before making a sassy retort or teasing someone. Context defines meaning; in recognition of the fact that my readers have only limited information - i.e., what I type - to work with, I try to choose my words with care and hope they will do me the favor of reserving judgment when our paths cross in real life.

Garrison Keillor says that you should never start a letter with an apology, which I think is pretty good advice, but he never said anything about essays. So prefacing this with an apology seems like as good a plan as any, me being from the Midwest and all: I apologize deeply for the tremendous traditionality of this piece. With the subject of this paper being the internets and all you’d think I could do better than the soggy old fifth-grade five-paragraph form, but I am an old English blue from the word go, and totally incapable of thinking about essays in any other way. I have neatly compartmentalized both my soul and the soul of the internet in three nice little boxes, and they’re going to constitute my three body paragraphs, and in a little while I’m going to have a nice sum-up paragraph that ties it all together and you’ll feel edified. (Or bored–farbeit from me to tell you how to feel.) Anyway, the functions of the web that I’m going to talk about are socialization, information addiction, and art, and my thesis going in is that by and large, the internet is so ingrained in my everyday life that it’s difficult to make a judgment call about it, about whether to praise or condemn it. On the whole, though, I’m going to praise, although as with any human construction more advanced than vomiting, it’s complicated.

My innocent, beautiful younger sister is living in sin. Out on the windy plains of Iowa, as millions of cornstalks bask in the baking sun and the wind brushes the feathers of the bobwhites and the mockingbirds, my sister’s balling her eyes out with the boy of her dreams as frequently as possible, them having a two-month window of pheromone-laced heaven before he trundles off to the hell of upstate New York and my sister goes alas, away, to London. This to me seems the very opposite of sinfulness; it seems slightly creepy for me to be pulling so hard for my sister’s virgin treasure to be so thoroughly plundered, but I think the whole situation is truly sweet. So the sex is not why my sister is living in sin; my sister is living in sin because as a cost-saving measure she has decided not to have an internet connection at home. This is terrible. She’s busy with the aforesaid hanky-panky–and also, she alleges, her two jobs–and so she never has her cell phone on, and that would be fine IF I were able to email her and she could respond. But in her case, the internet has failed in one of its most useful functions: as the social resource of last resort. Its failure in this case stands as the exception that proves the rule: my inability to communicate with my sister over the net is galling precisely because it works so well in the case of everyone else. At the moment I am living a long way away from almost all of the people I consider friends in my life, and by and large the internet is the way that I keep in touch with all of them. To me, this is a uncomplicatedly good thing–it seems like it would be so hard to keep in touch with people otherwise that my only option would be to jettison friends, and I have so few already this would shattering–gutting, as they say out here–but as a counterexample I should bring up the internet as a lonely-hearts repository. I am a big fan of dating sites on the internet, being a person much better at chatting up girls over email as opposed to at a bar with noise and smoke and no lights and a great deal of beer and sticky floors. The latter is such an unappealing location that I’d likely just not bother, and become an even more committed masturbator (and more on the glories of internet porn in a sec) until biology kicked in and I ordered a Russian bride from the Sears Roebuck catalog or wherever. And solely as a service to Katarina or whatever her name is it seems like it would be a good idea to have some idea how women work prior to actually marrying one, and that’s what dating sites function as for me, a way to understand women and painlessly get some experience with them. The trouble is–and I think it has wider implications for the trouble with net communications in general–that the profusion of women (and I’m certain the far-larger profusion of men) makes for a default attitude of replaceability, of anonymity and facelessness, towards the women that I do end up meeting over the internet. This doesn’t work out? Hey, no problem, not only are there a lot of fish in the sea, if you work at it even a little they’ll positively JUMP into your nets. Likewise, the more internet-savvy of my friends back home get a lot more attention from me than do their less-skilled (or less-Pavlovianly-shackled) counterparts back home, which leads to my valuation of my relationships with them being founded upon the completely arbitrary metric of e-savvy. In both cases, the internet proves a leveler, antithetical to actually thinking hard about and maintaining relationships based upon the actual people on the other side of this laptop. It has improbably achieved the digitization of that most analog of constructions, friendship, and that scares me a little. But I still can’t deny that I can’t get in contact with my sister any other way. Again, she’s the one who points out what the internet CAN do, and DOES do on a daily basis for me, and it’s not a small thing.

It seems I’ve been hearing from a number of wise luddites lately saying that they distrust the internet as a broker of information because it leads inevitably to addiction. A couple of individuals I can’t remember have said that they hate the dependency they’ve seen their friends develop for the information hit, the motivation behind Blackberries and the ESPN constantly-updating scores page. The internet gives us information that we want fast and hard and constantly, and I think there’s no accident that the rise of the internet has corresponded with first the rise of CNN–”tell me what I need to know now, and quickly”–and later of Fox News–”tell me what I need to THINK now, and quickly.” The British-style tabloidization of news was probably an inevitability, but the example of the net has opened the gates wide to the barbarians. Obviously, I oppose anything that leads to greater prominence for Bill O’Reilly (although greater prominence for Janeane Garofolo? I’m totally for that! Ahh, hypocrisy), but I think whatever his self-importance, O’Reilly is merely the filthiest tip of the tail of the dog being fiercely wagged by much larger forces. And these forces have everything to do with information. Out of the many monikers for our current age our narcissistic better-halves are fond of giving us, I think I like the “Information Age” the best, because I think it speaks both to the tremendous desire to know stuff that we have as people and also that information is a tool the same way bronze and iron are. In this sense, what the internet has done is take the concepts most famously celebrated in a large building in Alexandria and put them on tremendous growth hormones, taken the concept of being a repository of all that we have known or thought, democratized it, thrown open the doors to everyone, and slapped up a few porn ads along the way. (The porn stuff? Still coming.) I wanted to be a librarian once–I still do, in some other life–and while it’s possible to have your reaction to this tremendous wash of information be a haughty indignation at the stinky humanity of it all, I think it’s great. I think it’s great that we have constructed this new tool for ourselves. It’s exactly the same kind of thing as fire was once we learned to make it, as the sea was once we learned to build boats, as space would be if it weren’t so gosh darn hard to get to and to survive in. The internet as a repository of information is powerful and dangerous and powerful again: it can be immensely misused, it can be tremendously damaging, but once it is discovered and put in place there’s no stopping it. To bring this back to me, then: I’m as fully connected to the net as I know how. I have embraced this tool as hard as I can. I can’t pass a value judgment on whether that makes for a better me because the internet as information repository has simply made my old self obsolete. It is a tremendous tool, and I use it often and easily. There’s really nothing else to say.

And so, finally, we come to porn. And blogs. Actually, only blogs; porn is also a tool the same way as information is, and so it needs to be retroactively jammed into the last paragraph. Sorry to short you on the titillating bit; the rest is going to be just like what’s come before: very dry. (Oh, okay: the me with porn? He’s a much happier me than the me without. There, I said it.) So, blogs. I have had a life decidedly bereft of tragedy for the last couple of years, but one of the, say, five saddest things that’s happened so far in 2007 is the completion of the arc of bat-girl.com. It’s still live, but solely as a repository of previous greatness, and no longer as a thrumming generator of coruscating brilliance and fine wit and immeasurable silliness, which it was for two or three years of my experience. On the whole, I’m not a fan of blogs: the internet has made a world that I think on the whole needs less narcissism and more effort put into active communication with, you know, other people, and blogs are antithetical to that. They are mortifying, both to reader and writer, even as they’re inescapably appealing in a lowbrow, objectifying fashion. (Just like porn! MAN! That guy! It’s like any discussion of the internet is somehow closely tied with porn! Amazing. Or MAYBE it’s just me.) But bat-girl (and BatGirl, its author) opened my eyes to the tremendous possibilities blogs possess as performance spaces. They’re serialized to the point that even that workhorse Charles Dickens would blanch, but just like Dickens, given the right material and the right artist unbelievable things can happen. BatGirl, as was pointed out in her most thoughtful obituary, worked in an intriguing new style, where normal people we were predisposed to like became heroic cartoons of themselves, like that 80s Saturday morning show ProStars only done very well. Even a lineup-style catalog of her various nicknames and character constructions is (I hope) inherently intriguing: El Presidente, the shirtless fireman and savior of starving children in Venezuela and also Minnesotan cats in trees (And a 3-time Cy Young winner.) Captain Cheeseburger. Naked Batting Practice (or just NBP). Lewk Fordwalker. Sweetcheeks. DJ Cuddles. Dr. Morneau. Nutty, Scott Baker’s flying, singing protective cup. Little Nicky Punto, Tiny Superhero, his magic ass-unicorn and his unfortunate habit of being eaten whole. In a very silly but very real way this cast and many more constituted BatGirl’s Yoknapatawpha, her Dublin. The work it actually most resembled was Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, only BatGirl’s work was constructed at the outset of a form’s life, not in its death throes, and was more exciting (if less polished) for it. So in this sense, as a forum for the creation of new and exciting works that have the potential (NOT OFTEN REALIZED) to transcend their digital shackles and become art, the internet is an uncomplicatedly, wholly great thing. My life is much better for BatGirl’s presence in it.

(And just as a very quick aside, constituting a little from Column A, a little from Column B, as a lot of information warehouse and a speck of art, let me put in a plug for aldaily; that site has changed the way I think and live my life. It is unspeakably tremendous. It is another example of the net at its very, very best.)

So what to conclude? Yeah, not much, really. Maybe that I don’t (the immense length of the preceding to the contrary) think that much of the construction of the prompt? Yes, of course, the internet is part of who I am, a large part. Do I like this? Certainly I mislike parts of the internet, just as I mislike parts of myself. But on the whole, it’s a fact, the same way creationists and suicide bombers and desire and the wind in Wellington are facts. The internet is interesting, but a simple judgment call on its goodness–which to me at its most basic constitutes comparing one’s life with it with one’s imagined life without it–is pointless. Such judgments deny the internet’s inescapable factness. Let’s instead find ways to make it better, to bring it closer to the heart’s desire–with bravery and smarts and most of all hard work let’s direct our own miniscule portions of this titanic creation. Because our work is like a message in a bottle: who knows, as you cast it into the sea, where it’s going to end up? Let us at least make our message compelling.

I first met the internet in the form of an America Online account. My screen name was AthenaCSU, and it was the summer of 1996 - the summer before I left for my freshman year of college. That account and a handy dandy ethernet card kept me connected to my family and my high school friends from my Fort Collins dorm room. Sure, I used the world-wide-web, as it was still commonly referred to back then [I prefer the term “intarwebs” now], to download amusing Holy Grail .wav files [when I would minimize a window, my computer speakers would shout, “Help, help, I’m being repressed!” That was fun.], and my roommate would surreptitiously use it to find and download [and then use my printer to print full color!] pictures of Star Trek characters. But my primary use of the information superhighway, back then, was to swap stories of college life with far-flung friends from Southern California. [This was before cell phones, back when calling someone in a different state actually meant something, in terms of expense.]

As the internet has evolved, so too has my relationship with it. And although the internet continues to be a source of humor in my life [lolcats, anyone?], the major theme of connectivity remains, with the additional bonus of “instant gratification” that I cannot remember how I ever lived without. The introduction of a BlackBerry device to my technology arsenal allowed me to take the web with me wherever I went, and I immediately capitalized on this chance to stay connected with work as well as family and friends during my business travels - and also found it convenient that, as soon as a question popped into my head, the answer was, truly, right at my fingertips [Google is an amazing thing]. I love that, when a new friend plopped down next to me at the karaoke bar and asked, “What’s a round robin?” I could look up the answer. I love that, last week at happy hour, my BlackBerry helped me answer DJ’s question about “w00t” and taught us all what a backronym is.

Yet, those moments are fleeting; the true value of the internets, for me, lies in the social connectivity that it fosters. Like many, I blog, and catalog my photos on flickr. I still post regularly on an online scrapbooking message board [even thought it’s been nearly a year since I picked up patterned paper and adhesive] and when I wanted a vacation last year, I went to Massachusetts and stayed at the home of the owner who had, over the course of several months, become a friend merely through posts and email. Yesterday, I googled an old friend I haven’t spoken to in years. I found, first, articles she’d written for the Stanford Daily back in 1998; through more searching, I found her email address, and then finally, her blog. Through this, our first conversations in years - and, perhaps, if I am lucky, a rebuilding of a friendship that was once very important to me - have already begun.

Is the internet becoming part of who I am? I make a living researching and deciding how my company will blend classroom instruction with online training, and am currently tasked with developing a project plan to implement a Learning Management System to leverage the power of the internet to train and develop 40,000+ employees in over 38 states. I used a Google Earth image overlay of Doug’s climb up Mount Hood, tracked from his Forerunner GPS device and emailed to me, in a department presentation. And I learned a powerful lesson about relationships from Kynthia this week during a Google chat session. Indeed, the internet has become part of who I am.

Does the new me like it?

Yeah, I think she does.

Obviously, in the literal sense, the Internet is not part of me.
Would the Internet disappear, I might have countless things to mourn
about its absence, but none of those things would be “I’m just not me
anymore.” However, the question is obviously non-literal, and in turn
I’ll offer my non-literal answer.

The Internet is part of who I am in exactly same way that the
automobile, airplane, and telephone are part of who I am. My
conception of what is possible, easy, and best are all inextricably
linked with the technologies around me. This is nothing new. The
Internet is part of who I am is the exact same way that the bow and
arrow was part of who the hunters — who first had them — were. And
that the gun was to hunters who followed them. The Internet is an
important part of my daily routine, my livelihood, my conception of
work and of play. And, yes, the “new me” likes it.

Why does the new me like it? The new me, just like the old me, loves
information. I have loved to learn since before there was an
Internet. The readiness of information in the Internet age is
extremely exhilerating to people like me. I’ve noticed a recent
attitude shift: consider the common occurance of a question of fact
arising in conversation. Prior to the 20th century, I suspect these
things were often met with “I wonder if the answer to that question is
known?”. Somewhere during the 20th century, with huge growth in
scientific understanding, libraries, bookstores, etc, the attitude
became “I wonder how one could find the answer to that?” That is,
which library would you go to, which book would you need to find, and,
of course, what would it say. But now, in many cases, the question is
simply “is it easy enough for me to consult the Internet and find the
answer to that question?” And, to a surprising degree, the Internet
calls our bluff… even if we only need to reach across the table to
the nearest laptop, we often don’t, and just go on not knowing. There
could be a New Year’s Resolution there waiting to happen. :)

Of course, the Internet is about much more than learning. For
instance, my conception of work (by which I am referring to office
work, which is the kind I have always done) is almost entirely bound
up in the Internet. I am of a generation that will never understand
how offices functioned before email. Regardless whether a company
sells web services of deisel engines, email is now a core
communication medium, and in business it has countless benefits. It
encourages managers to be clear about their instructions, it allows
bosses and underlings alike to refer back to what was said in cases of
disagreement. It implies an automatic “paper (ha ha) trail” for
everyone involved. When I ask people what offices were like before
email, the word “memo” always comes up. *shudder* Keeping track of
all of that paper is inconceivable, at least in comparison to how I
keep track of my email. Of course, as the hunter with a gun would
have trouble imagining how people could survive hunting with bows and
arrows, there’s something to be said for me simply not being used to
it. But, that’s not much different from saying “the Internet has
become part of who I am”. And, in that light, the question of whether
I like it or not is silly in how easy it is to answer. Yes!
Otherwise I’d write memos!!

Separate from work, the Internet has also changed people’s conception
of personal communication. I remember when I first told others about
email, I heard of lot of people express the same reaction I had: “come
on, free communication to anywhere in the world?” It’s still kind of
hard to believe. Until you hear a story about how slowly information
spread in days gone by, and you realize we have no way to grasp how
information can travel slowly any longer. A secret now has every bit
as good a chance of being kept between people living on opposite sides
of the world as between people living in the same home. We can no
longer understand the importance of distance that the world understood
100 years ago, much less 500 years ago. The Internet and other
technologies have become part of us all. When I was little I didn’t
understand why people talked about the world “shrinking”. I don’t
really like the metaphor, but I have a much better appreciation of its
meaning now.

Besides learning and working, the Internet is also valuable for
recreation. The most obvious application along these lines –
computer games — do not much appeal to me. But I do enjoy reading
the blogs of my friends and others of strangers, both for the
discussion aspect and for fun. And for all the terrible humor on the
Internet, nearly everyone I know loves at least something that’s both
online and funny. I don’t see much point in going into details, I’m
sure everyone in this project has ways that they use the Internet for
fun, so why detail my particulars.

And, perhaps most interestingly, the Internet has become part of my
dreams. Literal dreams, of the sleeping hallucination variety, yes,
which is some measure of it being “part of me”. But also my dreams of
what is possible. Some quick examples:

* Thoughts of a transparent government are much more thoroughly
believable in the Internet era, and while I’m not at all impressed
with this as a reality yet, I cannot imagine we will not move in that
direction and our the Internet becomes more and more a part of who our
society is.

* If music and video can be cheaply copied and distibuted, do I feel
less willing to pay a record label to market music to me? How else
could artists be compensated? Surely the communication and commercial
possibilities of the Internet must offer some potential. But what?

* My standards of what counts as easy information are higher. While
I’m a unequivical fan of intellectual pursuits, I’m disturbed by the
difficulty with which the thoughts of acamademics can be appreciated
by the rest of us. Surely we can do better in the Internet Age.

* I love nutrition information on food products. But now, why can’t I
compare different food products side by side? Easily? In whatever
amount I choose?

The list goes on and on.

So, the Internet has affected my conception of work and play; formal
and casual communication; friendship and social hierarchy; the past,
the present and the future. To the degree that we can say that
anything external to us has become part of who we are, I think it’s
unquestionable that the Internet has become part of who I am. And,
although I have presented less direct evidence of it here, I hope it’s
indirectly clear that, yes, I like it.

Just so you know. I am going to treat this like a timed writing project which means that I am just going to write for an hour without stopping. I apologize ahead of time for whatever incoherence or loquaciousness occurs as a result. I used to do timed writing in my writing group and I think it is the only way I can get this done.

So, the first part is easy. The internet has definitely become a part of who I am. I check my e-mail first thing every morning and multiple times during the day. After that, I scan the news and read blogs and do random surfing according to whatever’s up for me at the time. I don’t even really regard my computer as useful if the internet isn’t working. How can I write if I can’t do a quick search to check my facts or clarify my thinking or stimulate my imagination or . . . . ? I’m not much for TV but I spend easily as much time online as the so-called “average American” spends watching TV.

Which brings me right away to the question about whether I like my wired self. I definitely do have some negative self-judgment about spending too much time on the computer. Much of which might be mitigated if I felt more productive with my time. Instead, I get overloaded and distracted and often feel intimidated by the possibilities I can see but can’t quite grasp.

You know that saying about humans only use 1/10th of our brains? I heard that’s not true and, of course, it makes no evolutionary sense, but when it comes to the internet it is more than true. I am using less than 1/100,000,000th of my cyber-brain.

Of course, most all of my stories start out with inadequacy as the theme.

What I’m thinking now is about how my experience of the internet corresponds on the concrete material plane to the more subtle spiritual experience of being connected to that vast ocean of possibility that is the ineffable. This comes up because, in my practice of gratitude, I have recently discovered that gratitude springs most naturally for me from my experience of kinship with the all and the none. My best counter to inadequacy, I have found, is simply to get in touch with the experience of cosmic kinship. Gratitude and abundance appear for me there.

Anyway, I am wondering what this analogy can teach me about my relationship to the internet. Is my attachment to my computer at all related to my desire to materialize my experience of cosmic kinship? Am I acting out an addiction? I have spoken with some readers of this essay about the role of drug use in expanding awareness and about my judgment that, despite the significant potential for learning, drug use itself will never deliver the spiritual goods. I wonder if this same insight needs to be applied to internet use?

I have certainly often struggled with questions about the reliability and authenticity of cyber-relationship. I think there is a very distinct danger that the powerful feeling of connection that comes from being in cyberspace prevents people from doing the much harder work of embodied connection in face-to-face life. Using the drug use analogy, it is so easy to get a drug-induced high that it is no wonder we often fail to do the very hard work of learning to generate those highs naturally and ongoingly for ourselves.

I am also interested in this question on the level of manifesting institutions. Awareness is not something that simply radiates from within singular bodies. Awareness can be shared and can radiate from communities. Awareness at this level shapes the material world and produces culture. Culture naturally takes the shape of compassion in a community where there is the shared awareness that compassion pertains to the nature of being. What I have known all my life is that compassion is waiting at every moment for two or more to have shared awareness that will allow it to be made known in material means. Two is not quite enough to start talking about culture and institutions but, from two, come the many.

Anyway, is the internet obstructing or promoting the creation of actual embodied community? Are new cultural institutions reflecting greater awareness being incubated or actually emerging? I conclude they are. But I also conclude that, to the extent that we fail to do the hard face-to-face work, they are at tremendous risk. How many people have stayed out of the streets and out of their legislator’s offices because it is so much easier to sign an on-line petition?

Part of me wants to jump and shout, “Hey folks, the internet could go down at any moment.” People are already hard at work to make sure that it’s most revolutionary possibilities are not realized. Local governments who want to make the internet available to citizens are being sued. Laws and regulations that give preference to private profit making possibilities are already operating and tons more are in the pipeline. You might remember or have read that radio and television were once hailed as technologies that would revolutionize democracy - giving people access to unlimited information and enabling them to build social movements. And now, what do we have? Giant international corporations who make private fortunes by using the earth’s atmosphere as a means to keep the people dumb, numb, and afraid of one another.

So, my hour is up. I can’t wait to read what you all have to say. Into whatever community is being created here, I send my deepest blessings.

I would be sad if the big tree in our front yard came crashing down into our living room. We can’t afford a replacement roof, let alone the windows, door and furniture on which it would fall. My family would cry. I would console, a stoic martyr standing up to a cruel world. We would survive.
Unless that damn tree took away my Internet.
[Shuddering]
The mere thought of being wrenched away from my daily routine of email, bookmarks, Google Reader, email, work, Twitter, email, Reader, chat, work, caffeine, Twitter, Reader, work, email, eat, talk, email, blog … it is enough to make me cry on my keyboard. I won’t, of course. The moisture might cause my hard drive to fail.
Part of me - a very small, cowardly part who is always insisting on using coasters on plastic tables - isn’t proud of the dependency I have formed. I repeat to myself all of the talking points for FOX news for the past decade, about how Internet is addictive and causes isolation and depression, about how people who use the computer contribute to our nation’s obesity problem, about how porn people, sexual predators and spammers are dominating the network. That part of me notes that it is 1:51a and I’m still typing. After all, aren’t there real people I could talk to and have a real relationship, in reality? I am tempted to pick up the phone and dial one of those people now.
But I don’t because the rest of me realizes that I have gained a far greater connection to those around me because of the Internet than I likely would have had without it.
My writing has improved. It comes with practice, and a decade’s worth of emails, blogs, wikis and forums have given me the reps I needed to toss words around with ease.
My communication improved through my writing. I may have spent a good decade rambling and verbose, but eventually I learned that writing is a cognitive dump, a way to get the thoughts out of my head where I can share and shape them.
My relationships improved through my communication skills. It took a very long time for me to be able to stand up in front of a crowd of people, the ones with those judgmental eyes, and talk confidently about what I know. I still hate talking on the phone or going to parties, where I fully expect to forget everyone’s name at the most inappropriate moment. But I initiate contact when necessary and listen intently.
My connection with the locals is stronger because of my improved ability to relate with others. I have access to the latest technology and world news, to last night’s ball game and the complete history of the franchise, and to the most mundane important moments of friends thousands of miles away. This doesn’t happen without the Internet.
I am identified not by the thoughts I have or the things I survive. My identity is in the relationships I form with those around me. That applies equally to those in geographic proximity and those whose ISP routers and a few hops away. As it happens, I am touching both worlds at the same time. My laptop and my son are both falling asleep in my lap.
That is who I am.

When we are babies, the entire world is a part of our conception of self. We cry when our mother leaves the room because we don’t understand how she can continue to exist when she is not in sight, and we lay claim to every toy we encounter because we have no sense of other people or their right to belongings. Even once we start to get a sense of our boundaries and learn to identify the bits of the world which we can directly control (we can clench our fingers and bend our knees, but we can’t move the table or the dog simply by willing it so), it still takes a while to fully understand the details. Many people have experienced the wonder that is a small child playing hide-and-seek simply by closing his/her eyes. “If I can’t see you, you can’t see me!” is a powerful first stab at logic that takes a few trials to disprove.

As we transition from infancy to childhood, our sense of self contracts to fit within the boundaries of our bodies. We are “us” and the rest of the world is “them.” It is arguably then the work of the rest of our lives to understand that “us” and “them” are both “people”, and therefore to expand our sense of humanity outward to the point where it fills the void left by our once universal sense of self. As babies, we believe the world to be a part of us; as adults, we understand that we are a part of the world.

In the course of this process of reexpansion, we rediscover some of the sense of connection and magic that was lost in our childhood. This time, however, instead of simply willing other parts of the world to move and expecting them to behave as our fingers do, we learn to enlist the help of tools. If we want to cross a river, we look for a log to use as a bridge. If the log is too heavy for us to lift, we look for a lever, or we use the power of language to ask others for help. As we grow skilled at using these tools, they become, in a very real sense, an extension of our self. We realize that the line between “us” and “them” is not quite as stark as it seemed on that day when we first realized that the world did not disappear for everyone whenever we closed our eyes. Our body is a boundary of one part of our identity, but other parts of “us” connect with and extend into the world in very real ways, and this is possible because of the human capacity to allocate some of the work we want to do to other people and things in the environment. Each time we do this our potential impact increases, and our sense of identity inches outward not as an extension of our ego, but as a recognition that “us” and “them” both belong to something that is larger than the sum of its parts.

In today’s world, there are many tools that we learn to wield as we grow. Reason and language - the first tools - are constantly evolving, and with each successive generation we find ourselves confronted with a new set of things that are quickly assimilated into our sense of self. Whether we take the time to think about it or not, most of the people reading this essay most likely consider running water, fresh produce, a car, a cell phone, and a computer (to name just a few examples) as parts of who they are, and we are currently confronted with the question of how the internet - a network of computers that are each a part of at least one person’s world - is further pushing that boundary, and whether it might be pushing too far too fast.

I believe that the internet is not simply a tool, it is an environment that enables a whole new class of tools to be invented. The creation of the internet is akin to the discovery that surfaces can be used to display writing - someone had to realize that before they started scribbling on the walls, and it took another giant leap from there to the idea that the scribbles could not only be pictures, but also words, equations, music… The internet is exciting because it is not an environment where the tools are more things. The currency of the internet is ideas, and as such it is sharable, storable, and manipulable in ways that things never are, and tools such as email, rss, and search are changing the way we think, which changes who we are. Just as language can be used to both unite and divide us, however, the internet can be used to both connect and cloister us, and it is up to us, in the years ahead, to remember that the internet does not disappear just because we filter it or close our browsers when we feel the need to hide. The internet is a part of all of us, and it is up to all of us to use it in ways that make us healthy and strong.

Hardly anyone who knows me knows this, but I’ve had an online diary for the last 6 years. With the exception of people I’ve met online, no one I know reads it. And even my closest friends are generally unaware of its existence. This is a good thing. My diary is not password protected, and even though I don’t reveal my name, I do use the first names of many of my friends. There are 712 entries, which I guess means I’ve written about twice a week on average. If you take out the last year, where I’ve been dismal at updating, it’d be much higher. There were periods when I’d update on a daily basis.

An online diary is different from a blog. A blog is generally public or issue-oriented. An online diary is just the same kind of diary you’d keep in a little book and lock with a key and hide beneath your mattress. You write in it the same way, too. Mine, for example, is a dismal wreck most of the time, almost every entry mentions some boy or other that I’m currently fascinated with or repulsed by or both. In fact, that was the reason I started the diary. I wanted some place to vent my stupid emotions that I recognized as mostly juvenile and irrational and I didn’t want to have to get into them with my friends. Most of my friends are intelligent people who don’t have these types of discussions. And my friends who like to “dish” about boys are generally just the friends I don’t want to know the details.

An online diary is also different because for most people, it is open to anyone. Currently 28 people have me marked as a friend diary, or whatever it’s called. I know many of them, and I also know many of their diaries are now defunct. I haven’t heard from those people in at least a few years. They were all internet friends, the ones who got me started on the online diary in the first place. It was a bizarre kind of relationship. A random group of people with a couple interests in common who shared the most intimate details of their lives with each other despite never talking face to face. These days, there are a small handful who I know read regularly. I have met a couple of them and also read their diaries. It is a strange kind of relationship.

I used to keep a regular diary, did so several times, but always ended up giving up eventually. The main reason for this is because I have terrible handwriting and generally don’t enjoy writing by hand. Typing comes easily and swiftly to me and it lets me actually channel my thoughts at a speed somewhat similar to the speed that the sentences are being formed in my head. I also have to admit that there was something appealing in other people being able to see my thoughts and give their own thoughts back. I suppose it was a rather naive way to look at things, but many parts of the internet present themselves that way. Open, friendly, etc.

Perhaps I was thinking the same way when I started an actual blog in the last few years. It was an autobiographical/issue blog. It was in a particular line of work that had a group of heavily read blogs that I enjoyed. I thought I had a voice to contribute. So I did. My diary writing experience left me largely unprepared for what I was in for. Instead of 5 readers, I had 50, even 500. When I was linked to by other blogs or had a post mentioned, stats would shoot up. I enjoyed it for the first couple months.

Then I put up a post on a topic I thought harmless only to be inundated with comments. Most of them vicious. Many of them insulting me and my work personally. When I read over the post, I supposed I could see how it could be interpreted the way they saw it, but I tried to justify with a subsequent post where I apologized for my offhanded remarks and clarified my position. Instead it just got worse. I deleted both posts, but nothing went away. I even had a couple people insist they thought they could figure out who I was (my geographical region was part of the catch of the blog) and were going to come and talk to me and show me how wrong I was. I took the whole thing down after a couple weeks of this.

I found myself strangely hurt by the venom I’d encountered. I didn’t know these people. They didn’t know me. And I knew that those in my profession, if they knew me, would understand where I was coming from and appreciate the work I did. Instead, a few words created an alternate version of me that a large group of people couldn’t let go of. It turned me off of the internet for a long time. I would get a knot in my stomach just logging on to update my regular diary, which I hardly did for the next few weeks. Months later it still had an impact.

I’ve started making the rounds again. I don’t read any of those same blogs I used to, but I do go to the strictly issue-oriented blogs in the morning to see what the news is in the profession. I have yet to comment on anything, I am what they call a “lurker,” but I want to. I suppose there is still some small fear of having the blogosphere turn against me.

My diary made me completely open, my blog practically caused me to shut down, but my blog reading has made me almost (shudder to think it) closed-minded. There is too much content out there these days, especially when it comes to news and political content. I have my guilty pleasure pages, sure, but the ones I read to keep me a well-informed citizen are shamefully one-sided. The internet is a partisan place. Sides throw mud. Then band together to throw mud back. The three different kinds of experiences I’ve had with the internet almost seem inconsistent.

But when I think about it, I guess they don’t. The way we work on the net now requires openness, honesty, a certain willingness to just come out and say it. And once you’re that honest, you find people who really honestly think the same way. Then when you find someone who’s honesty is different from yours, attack mode strikes. It can certainly be used as an enemy.

It’s great to make friends there, but honesty–and access to the honesty of others–can also be dangerous. I made a friend through my online diary. We became friends because he insulted my diary on his diary. (Both of us are long out of high school, I promise.) A mutual friend alerted me to this and I tried to address his concerns through a friendly email. Once we emailed back and forth it ended up we got along really well. We did so for several months. When I got out of a relationship, he admitted a crush, which I reciprocated. We were in different states, much too far to visit easily. We flirted for a few weeks. And then I met someone else. When I let him know I’d started a relationship, our friendship quickly ended and for the next year (until he found another girl to defame) I was regular fodder for his diary. This is a problem. When you have access to someone’s innermost thoughts but they happen to be really negative towards you, there’s a feeling you just shouldn’t be reading them. Maybe that kind of honesty needs to be face to face or completely anonymous. But is it any better when a diary blasts someone who’s completely unaware of its existence? Is it better to hide that honesty or say it straight out?

I don’t know what the real point of my diary is these days. I used to regularly go back and chart my progress. But my life has settled down considerably in the last year and the number of entries has drastically decreased. I feel detached from my older entries, like I’m looking back on a past life. It makes me wonder. Is happiness boring? Is drama what creates these fascinating diary entries? Or do I just need to learn how to look at happiness in an interesting way? In my early happy entries, I actually apologized to my readers. I generally hated happy diaries, mostly because they were happy and I wasn’t, which makes it very easy to hate someone. I was a little surprised when my readers responded by saying they enjoyed the happiness. I don’t quite know what’s wrong with them. I still find the troubled diaries much more interesting. Unless they are too troubled, in which case I worry a lot about their happiness.

That kind of intimacy has its ups and downs. Is it a problem that a small number of people know more about my inner thoughts than my family? Or is that the way these things are supposed to work? Anonymity makes it easy to share confidences. But I think it’s no mistake that my readers virtually all keep their own diaries, that I read. There is something about that reciprocal openness that makes all those questions unnecessary. It is a shared thing.

But maybe the thing that’s really affected my recent lack of entries more than my happiness is the fact that I’ve started to share my inner thoughts with someone. The diary is no longer the only outlet for my fears and concerns. One thing I’ve learned, the internet is a mecca for the lonely.