I am grateful for the internet. Who isn't? It is one of those things that I often give thanks for in my varying list of one hundred things to be grateful for. It goes without saying that the internet and the many advances in computer and phone technology have changed us tremendously. Or have they? It's hard not to think that things haven't changed a lot when you see so many people younger than forty stepping in dog shit while fixated on their dear little smart phones while they are walking down the sidewalk. Or bumping into lampposts. Or getting run over in traffic. Or being legally declared incompetent. (I added that last one, Gentle Reader!) On the other hand, young people have been stepping in dog shit, bumping into lampposts, getting run over in traffic, and needing desperately to be legally declared incompetent for decades. They used to have their faces buried in books, or newspapers, or whatever, or just up their hienies.
Still, it has made communications faster, more efficient and more global than any previous innovation. Like the thirteen year old girl whose father beat her with a belt after he caught her sexting on her phone. That was quite a scene, I would imagine, and now daddy has been charged, convicted, but has also won his appeal. Whatever you think of this style of discipline, it is still assault. On the other hand his daughter did cross, shall we say, a line? If it was my daughter? Who knows what I would have done. Should it have gone to the courts? Don't think so. Daddy might have accepted counselling, along with his child (who likely inhabits an eighteen year old's body)
But here I digress. The more things change, the more they stay the same. Remember Romeo and Juliet? There were no smart phones when Shakespeare was transforming the English language and it still didn't stop either of them. They both ended up dead, in case you don't remember.
I am grateful, especially, for email and Skype, for Spanish videos on YouTube and vintage episodes of All In The Family, and Maude, also on YouTube and for CBC videos when their official website isn't sputtering and threatening to shut down my computer.
I am grateful for the global network of friends and interesting acquaintances I now enjoy, thanks to all the resources available for doing language exchange with native Spanish speakers, as well as with the ease through the click of a mouse to maintain contact by email with others. The amazing bird and other images on Google have informed my art like nothing else and Wikipedia is always right there for us when we either want to win an argument or start a new one.
Did I say something about things remaining the same no matter how much they change?
If I have one single complaint about all this wonderful technology, it is in the way that the world has become a noisier and less tranquil and rather more frightening place, now that we have instant access to everything. There is no longer the soporific buffer of ignorance about what is going on in Russia, or North Korea, or-Horrors!-in the White House and the Oval Office.
As much as I love the crack-like fix from hearing, seeing, learning and knowing absolutely everything instantaneously in this rapidly shrinking world of ours, I can't help thinking what we are bartering off in exchange:
A sense of privacy. Tranquility. A more human and gentler scale to everything.
This is the real reason why I still won't get a smart phone. Nothing to do with cost, even though I do like to save money, and a lot more to do with a desire to maintain my slow, human scale and my quiet experience of the world. I am still happy to have the internet. I still prefer to wait till I get home to see what's in my inbox. I won't even get started on social media here, though, and besides, without the internet I would never be able to inform, entertain and irritate my Gentle Reader through this wonderful experience of blogging!
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