Not too long ago the World Wide Web celebrated its 20th birthday! With how dependent businesses, students, families, governments around the world have become it’s hard to believe it’s only 20.
The ability to gather information, educate, distract (lots of distraction) and travel to distant places and cultures without ever leaving your home. The Internet breaks down walls as never before and can bring to life places and people in ways that books or magazines can’t.
Learn more about the Civil War, see pictures of cats with silly captions, see the world’s great thinkers explain weighty matters, calculate how many micrograms in an ounce, watch art being made, brush up on your geometry, look up the box score of the 1927
World Series – you name it and there’s a good chance it’s available. The only requirement from you, the user, is a bit of imagination (how to find things) and a discerning eye (recognize what’s fact and what’s fiction).
Much to the chagrin of some that are close to me, I find myself wandering in and out of the Internet from time to time searching, learning, crying and laughing.
Maybe it should have been named the World Wide Time Suck, but I suppose that’s not too scholarly.
Yesterday I found myself a bit off the beaten track and in the course of 30 minutes there were tears in my eyes – tears of sorrow and tears generated by some of the funniest improv comedy separated by just a few mouse clicks.
I double dog dare you not to cry during or after watching these two videos.
First the tears of joy…
Then the other kinds of tears…
So, despite being a complete vortex into which time disappears, as Warden Norton said in Shawshank Redemption, “like a fart in the wind”, (thank you IMDB.com) I embrace the Internet and all it has to offer. It can never replace human interaction, but it can be an enlightening, educational, virtual encyclopedia that can bring our world closer together.
Of course, it can also teach us those life lessons that you used to be able to only learn from the “older kid down the block”.
Like the time my son wanted to build a potato cannon and I had no idea where to begin. Without the Internet we would never have had that time together launching russets.
Here I Write 