INTERNET
The Internet lets me connect with people that I want to connect with. The Internet will allow me on this Amtrak trip to be connected with people at home through these daily posts and through Facetime video phone calls. I will be able to take more books that I will ever read and more music than I will ever listen to on my iPad. I can read the Asheville Citizen Times and the New York Times daily. I will be able to use Google to tell me how to get from any place to any place with maps to guide me. It is all marvelous and transforms travel.
But it also allows anyone with whom I have the slightest contact to contact me. This is a side of the Internet that can be annoying and even a little bit weird and maybe even threatening. I realize that I have only to show a mild interest in a product, simply glance at it on line, and Amazon will follow me for weeks with offers for that product or other similar products. If I fall for the offer to join a petition for even the best of causes I am fairly certain that the petition will be of no significance and maybe not even submitted to anyone, or if submitted will not be paid attention to. The purpose of the petition is to find out what political cause I am interested in so that someone can put me on an email list in order to bombard me, without any effort or cost on the sender’s part with fundraising emails. Even as I was writing that sentence I got a call for the Senate Majority PAC. And of course if I give any money to any Democrat as I did during the last election cycle I will get fundraising phone calls and emails from Democrats all over the country. Val Demings who is running for the Senate in Florida contacts me ten times a day, Stacey Abrams, whom I greatly admire solicits every couple of days, Ralph Warnock who is running for the Senate in Greorgia, whom I admire, contacts me three times a day.
Even Siri, my personal Apple assistant on my iPad, reads my emails and enters the complete information and times of any flights I might be taking without consulting me or telling me that she is doing it.
And along with everyone else I get an enormous number of spam calls, most of which are identified by my iPhone as being spam if the person is not in my contact list which includes my Ear Nose and Throat doctor and others that I do want to hear from but don’t since I won’t answer the call.
And of course, although it hasn’t happened yet, someone will likely find a way into my bank account without my knowing it and rob me blind.
But beyond this positive side which enriches my life and this negative side which both annoys and threatens me, there is another side which I am barely aware of until I think about it a little bit, and even then I don’t have much of a clue as to what is happening.
Just as the computer has turned the world upside down, the Internet in only twenty years or so has turned the world into a different place than I grew up in. I feel as if others understand this better than I do and that I can only make a fool of myself by trying to figure my own way along through this issue but if affects me so much that I will try.
The computer and the Internet have transformed both time and space. I have always wondered what it would have been like if I had been born, as so many people have, in an authoritarian country. If I had everything in the way that related to people and think about myself would be different.
But then I realize that living in a totalitarian country today is every different from living in a totalitarian country 50 years ago and that is every different from living in authoritarian ruled countries 100 or 200 years ago. For most of humans time on earth almost everyone lived in villages that were only loosely connected to the larger political system. It didn’t matter much what kind of political system you lived in because villages were autonomous, little worlds of their own. But no longer. Now we are all squeezed together by the Internet and the computer. Earth may look the same from space but it looks completely different now than it did 100 years ago. We are connected with people we love and people we hate in tight bonds of communication. We have always been polarized, but now the Internet intensifies our bonds and intensifies or hatred and greatly intensifies polarization.
I don’t know how to deal with the effects of this polarization but I can certainly feel the effects of it. Tomorrow I will try and stumble through dealing with how it affects my being born by chance in a country with comparative freedom (so far) rather than a totalitarian state.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 