Random Interweb Thought #4

I spend a lot of time on line. Ironically I spend less time on line now than when I worked in a cubicle, in my early twenties, when I thought rather stupidly that a life working in politics was somehow akin to serving the public good. It was more akin to reading the newspapers on line, which in hindsight, provided me with a lot of good training for my current job as a part time teacher/part time writer/full-time blowhard. If anything, I may be over-qualified for this job.

I probably spend two to three hours a day on line. This includes e-mail time. I don’t spend a lot of time composing e-mails because I am getting terser as the years go by. Well, and because I don’t get a lot of e-mail. This is probably because of my terseness. The point is that I try to check my e-mail with frequency, but at two-minute intervals throughout the day, to check and see who exactly hasn’t e-mailed me back.

The new hoopla over the i-Phone got me thinking, as a luddite in theory but a hypocrite in practice because I do like the convenience of modern technology, about technology and its role in our lives. Surely, for my line of work the internet has made life far easier and I truly believe that most of us are much better off because of it. I even think our society is much better off because of it, for the most part, because I believe in the Mill doctrine for intellectual freedom and freedom of information. Get as much information out there and let the educated person sift through it, separating the good from the crap, with education and thought. Though idealistic, it hasn’t proved me wrong yet.

My colleagues in the blog world do exactly that. Some of them are crazy mo-fos and others are the conspiracy sorts. Some are woefully depressed and others so narcissistic that their postings read more like strange personal diary entries than substantive ruminations. There is a difference between the information that you think people should know about you and the information they want to know about you. Though you are supposed to learn this lesson in adolescence it has been lost on a whole bunch of bloggers who love the idea of the public confessional.

These are the sorts that give the blogger a bad name. Though I am on some shaky ground here at making distinctions, it is important to realize that there are differences in writers just as there are differences in people, and in the blog world there are excellent writers and horrible ones. What is truly amazing to me is the fact that there is so much good stuff out there being produced by individuals alone, from their homes, written over cups of coffee and with crying kids in the background. What ten years ago took a web staff to produce (a web designer, a copy writer, a web editor, and a web coordinator) now only takes a guy with six hundred words in his head and a high-speed internet connection, a matter of minutes. For most of us there are no editors, deadlines, or corporate interests. We have only our own initiative.

As the mainstream media continues to be consolidated by corporations and as the government continues its scary deceptions, this strange space for the individual and their thoughts is a libertarian playground of ideas.

America’s second intellectual movement, behind of course the enlightenment, whose ideals were put into practice this commemorative week in history, was transcendentalism. It was a broad category of thought coming into prominence in the early and mid-nineteenth century, like romanticism, but grittier and more American. An Emersonian belief in the religious sanctity of individualism is the legacy we inherit from this movement, as well, as the belief in American exceptionalism. Though I have issues with the latter, as we all do, the longest held belief of my entire adult life, other than a faith in God, is the belief in Emerson’s self-reliance.

The blogosphere is a transcendental space - whether it is used that way or not. It is a place for exploration in a world growing darker and smaller by each day with its terror plots and the carnage of a global war that seems to only increase in severity and scope. Our reliance on technology is somewhat discouraging because it sometimes prevents us from seeing the beauty around. Instead we focus in on our computer screens for breaking news or a casual note from an old friend on e-mail. At the same time there are far more people actually writing and posting than ever would have been allowed by the editorial guardians of print’s past. Certainly, this cannot be a bad thing for our society as a whole?

My point, I suppose, is that my life has been substantially changed because of the internet, but I haven’t, as a person with core beliefs, been changed much because of the time spent on line. I am a more informed person because of the internet and now I have this blog, so I am writing weekly on current events, but my core beliefs and the fundamentals of who I am haven’t changed because of my use of technology. In fact, they have been supported by it. Not all people can claim such a thing, for sure, since there are marriages that have broken up because of internet use, gambling, and pornography. I never went to the internet in search of carnality – I came in search of information. It has been a transformative, if not, a transcendental experience these past ten years.