The influence of the Internet on your life

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It's very hard to assess. I was a relatively early adopter, the first among people I knew to have a modem at home that I could use to access the web. Most people my age first properly used the internet at college/university but I'd been using it for some years already.

I found it liberating back then. I could escape my home and my small town life and talk to people from all over the world. It seemed that everyone was oddball and nerdy online back then. I had great fun. I felt more normal. One of the reasons I like WP so much is because it reminds me of those early days.

But...

Would I have been more sociable if I didn't have chatrooms to disappear into? Would I have made more friends in real life if the little social itch I do have couldn't have been satisfied from my lonely room? Would I have learnt better social skills? Would I have created more if it weren't so easy to sit and consume, endlessly?

Who knows.

I much preferred the internet when it was a little exclusive, but I think that's true of everything. Someone said "There's nothing good that can't be ruined by making it available to everyone," or something like that. That's how I feel about the internet now.

It's become all-consuming. So much of life takes place online now and I think that's generally to the detriment of my life and humanity in general.

Im addicted to coming to this site all of the time. So right there the Net has effected me. And I dont even do other social websites (like facebook or TikTok etc). And dont even have a smart phone to bury my face into 24/7 like everyone else seems to.

Have had some bad experiences. Like when I bought a new computer after having no access to the Net for a while. And as soon as I turned it on ...the predators jumped on me like a babe in the woods.


On the other hand I used to do a public access radio show from a studio at a local station that went over the local cable TV, and over the ...Net.

Decided to do a show commemorating the "15th anniversary of the Internet" in 2009. The Net predated 1994 by decades but the Net as we know it (open to the public) didnt exist until 1994 when the legal roadblocks were taken down by Congress.

While researching for the show I ran across an interesting tidbit...that way back in 1947 someone had written a sci fi story that depicted something like personal computers and something a lot like the internet (and the problems created by it).

So...I recalled that an older guy at the radio station who played many old time radio shows on his show...told me about how sci fi novels were often dramatized on old time radio in the Forties and early Fifties (before TV drove radio out of the drama business):the best shows being Dimensions X, and X Minus One. So I went on the...NET to see if anyone HAD dramatized this particular story back in the day. Sure enough it had been on (forget which one) of the two above shows in 1952. Got to hear it on the computer off of the NET....and I...downloaded it and burned it onto a CD, and then...played the 1952 radio rendition of the 1947 story on my 2009 public access radio show.

The point being that doing this show ABOUT the Internet became itself a testament to the Internet and how easy it is to access information and material on it. And all in a good way.