The Internet has undoubtedly improved life and communication and the spread of knowledge, but I've personally thought for some time now that it has also utterly destroyed life , in some sense, for many of us who live in smaller, not totally urban or "cosmopolitan" places. I've felt this way for a long time now....and I have my reasons.
Most of them are probably so obvious that they are not worth writing about. And yet ....sometimes certain things that we think are obvious aren't so obvious to others. I suppose this is also probably the case when it comes to my perception of the net: for me personally I'm convinced it destroyed my own experience of my small town, but for others maybe they really just don't think about it ...because they use the Internet for other things.i don't know.
I unfortunately, of course, at some point found myself using the Internet primarily to connect with and learn about the biggest cities and cultures that the earth has to offer, and thiugh I have not seen the vast majority of the worlds biggest or most international cities , I still feel, pretty much on a daily basis--- even in a small town as I am---fairly in touch with all of the massive cities as a result of just how easily accessible they all are to me , through my various little screens. On the Internet, if you know what you're doing , it's sort of like you're in a permanent airport , arriving and departing constantly. Everywhere on the Internet is JFK. Everywhere is Times Square. Everywhere is the biggest shopping mall... So on so forth. I have watched Times Square, Rome, Saint Petersburg, and parts of Dublin and Mexico City et cetera so many times from an aerial view with a webcam for instance , that I've basically memorized the center layouts of cities I've never even seen more than a single time, or even for that matter rven once.
In a previous epoch of course (which means to say just 20 years ago) all of this would have been absolutely impossible for me, unless I had some means to actually travel to the cities or airprts or malls in question, which of course , just like now, I probably never wild have had. All the many newspapers I'm able to read, even just newspapers from literally one city over in my same state, would have been utterly inaccessible to me. I would have been completely localized, in much the same way my parents and grandparents actually still are this moment, since they don't really use the net in the same fashion .
This is, In fact, why I'm trying to say that the Internet has destroyed my small town experience: I sometimes feel as though I was perhaps *meant to be* a completely provincial character, but suddenly this little cheat code called the Internet popped up inside the dream, and it made me aware of things that, again , I never would have been aware of otherwise. At the same time as that , however, it never really exactly tossed me anything either. The Internet only helps you hitch so many rides..
Which means to say that, though the Internet has given me endless information and resources (in a very nonchalant way) and even helped me learn whole other tongues, it never actually gave me the means to really engage with reality in the same manner in which it allows me to so easily "surf" reality. I essentially think of the Internet like a massive series of connected and very beautifully sculpted marble libraries , and you can keep walking through them, and you can look out windows as you pass from one librsry to the next (they're all sort of connected like a train I suppose, one door leads to the next librsry) but you never actually manage to really hit an actual street because of it, because the Internet still isn't quite connected to all of that yet. It's not really respected yet, believe it or not. It's all incredibly disorganized. Ships are just sailing everywhere. You find the greatest information in the most out of the way places. Nothing is organized. Nothing means anything. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly, but it's almost as if "everything that happens on the Internet , stays on the Internet."
Someone in reality for instance gets their passport marked at every step of their journey and every new airport and country they hit. This passport can, one imagines, be used to impress real world people..."oh look I was traveling widely all those years...I am well rounded..." It is Seen as an achievement, and rightfully so. You can make silly videos of your real world travels, even just walking down a boulevard doing nothing ,
As an Internet traveler, however , I instesd have no record of my journeys. I've ridden some seriously informative and wide highways through the world of the net, but for all the world cares I was just watching Scooby Doo. Hence I say again: the Internet is this deeply powerful thing, in Many ways significantly more powerful than any basic librsry curently even around in the world, yet it gets no credit whatsoever. Just think of an author writing a novel who was trying to express that his character was a studious sort trying to learn about something: "he went to the library" still carries more weight for a reader than "he logged online". it shouldn't of course , because in truth my local library here -- though it's fun--- is , in fact, just as provincial, and local, and quaint as the town itself that I'm in. I cannot find any books in every world language in there, like I can 2 minutes from now in 3 clicks online. I can't find 4 people in there to come tearing through my laptop speakers who are eager to teach me Spanish just because I suddenly feel like being taught Spanish. The librsry is essentially useless and pretty boring, just like the town. I can't go to my library and find a video tape , after I've finished reading a book by a random German author, of him giving an in depth interview about the book in German . I can do that online, of course, and I do, constantly.
What would the local library have perhaps looked like to me if I had never had any Internet whatsoever I sometimes wonder, of course? Would I have Been someone who was often in the library even though it was local and Tiny? Would I perhaps have made serious efforts to reach bigger libraries? Would I have made it a point to travel to them? I sometimes am not so sure. Personally I don't really think so. Personally, judging by my family and the people I know , who don't seem to be interested in much even though they're in this age of the Internet, something tells me i probably would have just taken what was in front of me....which would have been next to nothing but a TV, really. I would have never thought at all of the great wide world. It would have never been presented to me.
This is , you see, deeply problematic I think because it has made me almost painfully aware of my terrible real world limitations but it also has offered no concrete and simple, straight forward way to escape these limitations. I log onto the Internet and often communicate with people who are my "social class superiors" (this would have also been largely impossible in a pre Internet time in many respects) yet I myself am actually still trapped *completely* in the same social class I started in. I'm still trapped in the same town. The same dismal city. So on and so forth.
Of course at this point some people out there (like the ones who just seem to magically figure everything out , mysteriously travel everywhere, start successful blogs and have never felt hungry for even a morning) might tell me that I , what, shouldn't expect the Internet , of all things, to just "hand me over a life" (or something to that effect) but my response to these people is that, in many ways, the Internet is handing over to all of us, to a degree, a certain type of life , that years ago would have been pretty hard to obtain for the average person, and no one says we ought to cut that out, and they don't say that we're not breaking bask enough for it either, really . No one even thinks of it. Most of us think of the vast web of information the Internet gives us in the same way that we think of cars now: we don't realize how much of an improvement this is from what once was only a short while ago, when everyone was on a horse or just walking by foot from town to town. Would you ever say to someone in a car "I think you ought to blow it up and ride a horse, so that you can really earn the miles you're traveling?" You would not say this. We are all quite relieved that the internet has made learning easier than it once was. Convenience has always been the name of the game when it comes to societal advancement....
Many people however don't seem to totally register- somehow- just how easy and convenient the Internet has made many things that were once very hard....
My grandfather born in 1936, I always say, would of had to seriously spend some real time to watch all the old and rare Elvis Presley clips I've managed to find - for free after a few clicks -- on the Internet. He would have had to put some back into it. He would have had to spend some dough . So on and so forth. (Even if the Elvis clips weren't freely available on YouTube, he still would of had a harder time because of no Amazon)
I instesd have , over the years, watched the entirety of Elvis Presley's singing parts in films almost without even really wanting to all that badly, just because of how easily accessible it is to me. In 1955 I would have had to beg for it and break rocks for it, in the same way, you see, that we all stil have to break rocks to get our physical car from one highway exit to th next. Or from one hotel room to the next... Etc. I
Again, remember: i didn't necessarily ask to be presented to the whole world when I first logged online as a kid. I just thought I was logging on to play ...what...Oregon Trail. I didn't realize it was gonna destroy my small town life and reveal it for how boring and dismal and limited I t actually was.....
In my opinion the Internet quite frankly threw the entire world right in my face, and this includes both the ugly part of it (with all those damn newspapers) and the beautiful part of it, but then it never did anything beyond that. It made my little town look like some unpopulated uncharted Wild West/-- yet never really offered a way out of it. Get it? ..
So what I'm really asking here , and putting forward, is something like....how much longer will it really be now, until the Internet even starts to annihilate real world borders and class distinctions and make it easier to travel them, in a way that we are, sadly, not seeing it do right now? For example, again, it's very easy for me in this time period to, within literally an hour of deciding I want to, make friends with people in any part of the world I want to, in a way that my grandfather never could have even dreamed when he was my age in the early 1960s...and yet, getting to all the real world locations is still just as hard as it was during his time, if not maybe even harder (ironically) due to the fact that the economy is 100 times worse now and the fuel prices are completely out of whack, in comparison to what they once were. I've always said for example that, in our own time, Jack Kerouacs entire On the Road tale probably wouldn't happen right now, because the characters would , more likely than not, run out of gas after two states at best and then turn around shortly thereafter to go home, log online, and look at pictures of the cities on google earth and Instagram....
A lot of people might think that the Internet has almost caused a loss of interest in the outside world, but I'm not so sure of that. I do think it has rendered it somewhat less interesting than it used to be ...of course..especially when it comes to small towns as I'm saying....I cannot stress enough how much the internet has destroyed my perception of this town .... But I also think that it's sort of being used as a, I don't know, a means to an end or something. It's almost as though we are collectively getting closer to the realization that the manner in which we have made traveling physically so expensive and difficult and - of course- frightenjng -is absolutely absurd, and so we have created this machine to help us cheat physicality in order to still communicate and bypass it, because deep down we do want to free up the world--- but we still can't quite overcome the physical boundaries and -- particualrly --- the assholes who build walls and toll booths and ruin it for everyone out there. We still can't quite get rid of these people and as we see now with the Pathetic President, they are actually even getting stronger in some ways. But just imagine how ridiculous these border lovers and toll booth builders appear from an Internet perspective.....
For example, on the Internet, just think of how absolutely preposterous it would sound if I were to tell you that we ought to build a wall between the Mexican side of the net and the american side of the net, or if I said that we ought to flip out whenever we see something not written in English on the net , et cetera. It would sound absolutely ridiculous to most people ...and no one would understand it...no one in their right mind would really want it ...yet in the real world the idea still reigns King because...well, I guess because It always has. In the real world, we still find it quite hard to trust essentially everyone. We are still pretty obsessed with our little sandboxes, and we are thus also still obsessed with setting our lives in certain places in particular. We are all talking about and viewing more places and lives than ever before with our screens - many of us traveling seriously deep with them --rendering the gossip of our small towns minute--yet we alll still have this idea in our heads that, you know, you're still supposed to only work jn that one city , and drive that one road to that one office every morning , and send your kid to that same school every day, so on and so forth. This is of course- again- because of trust. In my opinion at least....
I sometimes wonder for instance: Of all of all the seriously far flung people I've met and talked to over the years on the Internet, and gotten seriously intimate with at times, how terrified would I have perhaps been in reality if they had asked me to travel and go see them and live with them for a few months? Or even just to go to their actual residence for a night? Would I trust them? How long would I have to wait before I trusted them to not perhaps stab me in the middle of the night as I slept? This is what takes us now , again, to my next big question of the Internet and what I think the future is going to be for it, and how I think it might, after enough time has passed and there are no more Pathetic Presidents obsessing over real word borders to haunt us, work out for the real world....
And what I have basically believed for some time is that the future might be one that is going to be filled with a lot of sharing that we just do not see now but that we are, if you look carefully, starting to see via the Internet in little, tiny ways. It's very easy for me to imagine a point in time when even regular and happy families raising young children will have the chance to be constantly on the move through the world, thanks to some sort of network that will be set up on the Internet. I can envision a situation where something that is very difficult - or at least somewhat difficult in our own time and time consuming - like enrollment of a child in a school, will become something very simple and fast, and maybe even something that, thanks to the Internet, one can alter weekly, or even daily. It may of course also soon wind up being the case that the entire idea of even having a fixed school in some physical location to attend will begin to look absolutely absurd to the people of the future ...in much the same way that the old "colonial style" schools of the 1800s (where K-8th was often tsught in one room) now look absurd to us. Quite frankly I think the necessity of the physical school buildings has already been rendered fairly obsolete but people don't want to yet let it go because, again, just like the borders, they cannot yet even fathom anything else. There's also the fact that the Internet has only really just begun to flood all the streets of the cities from the rich ones to the poor ones. When I was in high school in the middle 00s, it was essentially unheard of for someone to have the ability to shoot video of themselves. Smartphones have changed that . Which is why I basically consider the age of the smartphone and not the laptop, in fact, as the first real flooding of the Internet into all of the city. It was really with the smartphones that the masses logged online, in my opinion, and it was also really with the smartphones that the idea of traveling became less frightening than it had ever previously been....
In our age you can now essentially walk any developed world city as though you are a native of it because of how mapped out the smartphones have made it for us. This is an absolutely enormous detail.... and it has made traveling very simple in a way that it never was before. In the past knowing all the routes of a city or an area was a sign that you had lived it , that you were a native, etc. Now what does it mean? It doesn't mean anything anymore. And, though on one end this seems "sad" because it somewhat renders the directions that a native can give you useless, it's also very joyous because now those natives can go to other cities and feel like natives there too. Which makes life a whole lot more interesting in my opinion. And also makes traveling look a whole lot more enjoyable, interesting, and convenient as well as something that you can do without boat loads of fear.
This is why I keep stressing the point about why I think it's only a matter of time now until people start getting seriously annoyed with the current and average real world lifestyle of having this obsession with the fixed physical base . Personally I can't fathom how they're not annoyed with it righ now already, but then I often have to remind myself that I've been online in a serious way essentially since the late 1990s and most people only just got on around 2010 as I said, with the smartphones. My small town and its contained gossip was rendered boring years ago because of the net. I was disillusioned with it when I was 13. But for most people I think this is only just beginning to occur. They're only just beginning to get their veins pumped up with what I suppose we shoul call "Internet dope".
What does Internet dope do? It does what I've already told you: it fills you with wanderlust, it makes you feel international, it makes you yearn for other tongues and cultures, it fills your head with images of everywhere, and it also - this is the negative part--- renders your own culture, as I keep stressing, wildly uninteresting in comparison to the vast culture at your fingertips inside your screen.....
I think this has become too long now but I'll try to continue it .... Elsewhere...
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