Someone not long ago asked me, “What doors did the internet open for you?”
With great eagerness and excitement, I explained with little hesitation, “The doors to every imaginable kind of learning, knowledge, entertainment, books, the arts, education, photography, greet writing, journalism, and above all, contact with others. All possible since 1995 and would have been totally inconceivable to me in the decades prior…”
Young people today who grew up on the Internet, naturally take this for granted, as if it’s not just a part of life, it IS their life.
I had 45 years before the Internet came along, and even back in the beginning in the mid-90s, I don’t think anyone could have remotely imagined what smart phones would be capable of.
Before he died, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer, asked Walter Isaacson, the prominent sage, public intellectual, biographer, and former executive at both CNN and Time, to write his biography. For anyone who feels their life has been inalterably changed by the iPhone, the miraculous device Jobs conceived that has opened up the Internet to billions of people around the world, this book probably should be must reading.
Since I bought my first iPhone in 2008, the internet re-opened a floodgate of mobile and at-home learning, entertainment and education for me that would have been inconceivable in my formative decades of the 1960s and 70s. I cannot imagine life without my phone. I haven’t even used a laptop or desktop in more than ten years.
The problem, as you know, is an excess of riches beyond imagining, as well as trivialities and trash, much of it potentially harmful and addictive.
Since Day 1 when I first connected at home to the Internet via the Netscape 2.0 browser in 1996, immersion in so many of the venues of cyberspace has always been overwhelmingly novel and exciting, and vastly time-consuming. It became front and center at my library job, and as soon as I got home.
My concept of time has changed. The Internet and social media such as YouTube and Instagram, and more and more these days, Substack, definitely keep me in the grip of hyper habituation, or, I dare say, addiction, because after decades it’s now hard to do anything as simple and profoundly beneficial as read a good book, non-fiction in my case. I don’t have a TV or large screen viewing device. No laptop or desktop computer, either. Just my iPhone and an iPad. It’s been this way for about ten years now. I have no regrets. No apologies. It’s how life for a solitary and aging man has been constantly stimulated and rejuvenated.
In fact, I had sort of an epiphany the other day as I was thinking about this essay. It occurred to me that the reason I have become so immersed in, and wedded to, the internet over decades now, is that it has become my sole means of reaching out to others and sharing my life, even if I never see or talk to them in person. I sometimes wonder if we Baby Boomers mused in the previous century that this form of communication would be prevalent in the next century. Sci-fi writers, maybe.
I have no spouse or partner, no children or grandchildren. I’m alone in my apartment, but not alone. My thoughts are often about the people I connect with online through my writing and photography communities, YouTube, Instagram, Flickr and the countless other sources and opportunities for learning and connection. The sky is the limit. Retired for almost ten years now, I’m homebound by my imagination, deep curiosity about so many fields of knowledge, and, of course, limited time left and health considerations, should they arise and diminish my presence online.
This is merely one person’s way of coping with and rising above his serious lack of friends and socializing. But it’s no longer something to grieve over as I might when I was younger, or get depressed about. I’m alone physically but far from alone in every other way.
My lifestyle would be unimaginable to someone who has a spouse and children and grandchildren. They would have much more time and opportunity for social interaction than I ever could or would have.
Thus, the Internet takes up most of my non-sleeping time. I try to be selective, but then something better, more shocking, amazing, awe-inspiring or mind-blowing always comes along. I’m in a state of constant anticipation of the novel and unknown. What will be next? Where should I direct my attention among all the choices. Anyone who could ever say they are bored is definitely lacking some dark or means of entry to whet’s out there, on and on and on.
Life is tragedy and comedy, both absurdist and realist theater. We all act and play our parts, but today with the rapid adoption of AI chatbot technologies, it is possible for our scripts for life and work to be quickly re-formulated and our knowledge, and even companionship, sourced from and even controlled by artificial intelligence, if not now, much more certainly in a few years time.
Before long, when we can hardly tell what’s real and what’s not, we could be spending all our script/self/quality time, trying to survive in a world that seems to have gone mad, and, maddeningly, still full of the great beauty and love that is all that holds us together in the sweeping paradigm shift that is upon us now.
Tower of Babel
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