And the Award Goes to…

Little is said about the internet, yet it is a fact of everyday life.  I suspect it came about so rapidly, relatively speaking, than most other technologies, and integrated itself into our daily activities at a speed that defied logic.

It started as ARPANET, a military experiment in keep networks up regardless of nodes being taken out.  It was initially used by the military, then migrated to university research.   Since it was at universities, it became a tool of the students also.  It can be argued that this is the point at which it started its descent into Hades.  As we all know, students already know everything, thus they take their omniscience online to prove it to the rest of the world.  This infected Usenet, the part of the internet that brought us newsgroups.*

At this point, the World Wide Web, as we know it, was barely an infant.  As some people today would note, “It ain’t got no pitchers.”  Yes, it was only text.  Your browser might have been something called lynx and you brought it up from a command prompt (you telneted to a unix box).

Today we’re spoiled.  From its humble beginnings we have a multimedia World Wide Web that brings us everything we could ever want (including spyware and viruses).  We have instant email (with pitchers - and viruses).  Some of us get our news from the net (the smart ones).  It’s a universal research tool: there’s more information available on the web than in hundreds of libraries.

Near instant communication brings another oft-neglected benefit: it fights the Bad Guys<tm>.  It resists censorship (except in China) and can spread word of news that is conveniently `left out’ of the mainstream media.  By the same token it includes disinformation/misinformation from the Bad Guys<tm>, as well as allowing them to monitor things with considerably less difficulty than is required to listen in to our phone calls, read our emails, and intercept our faxes (make no mistake - this is precisely what they’re doing.  Do you think the tapping equipment at the AT&T facility in San Francisco was the only instance of it?).

The net is also having the effect of making the globe a lot smaller.  People with similar interests gather in online groups to discuss their common interest.  Let’s face it - you’re not likely to find a large group of left-handed guitar players locally but if you ask worldwide, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.  Need some information on multiple personality disorder?  Years ago you couldn’t even find a doctor to tell you about it.  Now there are lots of places to research it.  As if that weren’t enough, you can find groups of significant others of people with multiple personality disorder with which to commiserate and share information.

Are you a vacuum tube fan?  You can hook up with tons of other vacuum tube fans across the globe online.  You can share information and learn from people who used to work on tube equipment when everything had tubes in it.  People who designed some of the equipment.

Do you suspect your government is not telling the whole truth about something (or everything)?  You can look into this online.  Did a UFO crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947?  Do some research, read others’ research and decide for yourself.   Just remember there is disinformation out there too.  You really need to sharpen your BS detector before you go online.

While you’re meeting people with similar interests, you start to notice that people from other countries are pretty nice.  In fact, some of the countries with which your country is at war turn out to have some really nice people living there.  You start to ask yourself why your country is at war with that country then.  It’s a much smaller world than you have been told.

Sometimes you form longstanding friendships with people you have never met in person.  Sometimes you get to meet these people.  Even though you hear the sensationalist news about the rapists and murderers on the internet, the people you meet turn out to be really nice.  Some become like family.  We have a new term: virtual family or Family of Choice.  Some people even fall in love over the internet (who am I to judge?).

Art is spread over the net.  The entire warped business model of the MPAA and RIAA is falling apart.  Publishing has been turned on its ear now that everyone can be a publisher (web page or blog).

We haven’t had these benefits for very long but we have become reliant upon them.  We have come to take them for granted.  There are entire generations that have never known a time before the net.

For these reasons, I award the leftystrat Technical Peace Prize to the internet.

*[newsgroups are poised to sail into history, due to Andrew Cuomo and his cohorts' insistence that since a few newsgroups may carry kiddie porn, newsgroups must all be dropped (all tens of thousands of them) from large providers like AOL and the rest of them.]