From 1993 to 1996, the Island Independent newspaper offered incisive, wide-ranging commentary on community and bioregional issues, and evidenced a literary panorama and level of excellence which was sorely needed, and is sorely missed.
Face it: there's a fairly common belief that when a person goes online, they often disappear. All of a sudden they aren't doing what they used to do. They can't comment on the latest episode of ER. Their daily quota of mass media plummets. Acquaintances say: "She's surfing the Net," conferring the terrible title of "surfer" that implies a mindless, timeless loss of self. And listeners nod, comforted that a label has successfully been assigned. There's an implicit phrase being shouted here, equivalent to the old line: "Don't just stand there, do something." In fact, there's a lot going on, in the same way that there's lots happening when a high school or college student diappears before finals. Here's an illustration that may help:
I grew up building things; that was the nature of farm life. One built buildings with hammers, nails, studs, and rafters, using the methods of one's parents and grandparents. After the farm I did other things for ten years or so, and then I found myself building again. In the time I was away, the pneumatic nail gun had filtered down to the small contractor level, and the router had found its way out of the shop and onto the job site. Instead of one nail every ten seconds or so, nails were planted at two per second. And while walls were still being built flat and then tipped up into position, window and door openings were simply sheeted over with plywood and then cut out with the router: zip, zip, zip, zip. Things were lots faster, yes, but more importantly, an important mental shift in the building and scheduling process had taken place.
So what does this have to do with net surfers and getting things done? Well, it's an example of how new methods and ideas change processes. Ecomm does that: it introduces entirely new ways of discovery. That's why people new to ecomm often become engrossed. They discover the wealth of knowledge about their hobbies, concerns, and interests that is simply not available anywhere else. More pointedly, they are learning, which I judge to be a more laudable pursuit than vegging out at the virtual trauma center.
Something else is going on too: people are talking to other people. Networking via ecomm is gaining an entirely new dimension. And the combination of ecomm
I found lesson and unit plans, online interactive K-12 schools, informational and organizational guidelines, research groups, on and on and on. Perhaps most importantly, at every one of those sites I found people interested in home schooling, thinking about home schooling, doing something about home schooling, helping each other with home schooling. Once upon a time home schooling meant parents teaching children, working on their own in a relative vacuum, with a meager supply of appropriate information and personal support. No more.
But I don't care a hoot about home schooling, you say. No matter, that's not my point. Whatever you're interested in, whether it be fly tying, Egyptology, formation bungee jumping, writing music, co-housing, solving a problem on your car, or getting the latest on hydrogen fuel cell membrane technology, you'll find information and people with answers as close as your cup of coffee.
It's important not to get stuck on the litany of information information information. While information may be the initial attraction that draws one to Net resources, it is the people one finds who are the greater treasure. Information, after all, just lays there like a watermelon in a garden. People, on the other hand, respond, can answer appropriate questions, can direct you to new sources, can help you solve your specific problems. Human ecomm resources are actually a vibrant dispersed community, united by a shared interest, and constantly growing in number and knowledge. Furthermore, the playing field is dead level: you might find your answer talking to an organic farmer in Wormhole, Idaho, or just as easily, an internationally recognized watermelon expert in Belgium or Australia.
There's a final piece to this puzzle that has to do with the flood of information that can pour out of ecomm. If one accessed the same amount of information in a library that one can access in an hour of online research, one would need a two ton truck to lug everything home. But in ecomm, all that info weighs exactly zip. The very nature of the access method allows one to neatly sidestep useless
information, to bookmark questionable resources, and to choose exactly what one wants to keep.
In my first column I mentioned that the ideal information processing tool would be a kind of information net--a seine with a brain I said--that traps the things one's interested in, and lets all other information pass through. I implied then that the seine was a computer, and it can be. But ecomm also grants access to a far more powerful, satisfying, and often humorous information filter: the minds of other people. ER doesn't have a chance
Today's Cyber-Quotes: Pick one you like. Pick two.
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." --Ken Olson, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977
"If everyone is thinking alike then somebody isn't thinking." -- General George S. Patton
"Education is not filling a bucket, but lighting a fire." --- William Yeats
"Creativity is more important than knowledge" ---Albert Einstein
"The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them." ---Albert Einstein
"We cannot become what we need to be by remaining what we are." -- Max De Pree
"I can't change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails." -- Jimmy Dean
"This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." --Western Union internal memo, 1876.
"Reason can answer questions...But imagination has to ask them.--Ralph Gerard
The whole art of teaching is only the art of awakening the natural curiosity of young minds for the purpose of satisfying it afterwards. --Anatole France, in The Crime of Sylvestyre Bonnard
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Column Number Five, unpublished.