The Beginning of a Beginning

A long time ago, in a city far away, an abnormally-tall, middle school girl turned on her Tandy 286 and spoke the magical language of DOS. In the beginning, all she needed was her cheat sheet of shortcuts and the glow of the screen to keep her satisfied. Time passed and her computers got bigger and better and faster and smarter. Eventually, the over-publicized, market-saturated parade of Gateway was too inexpensive and looming to ignore. The brilliantly cow-speckled boxes arrived and the girl began a new chapter in her story of technology. This new chapter was to be called “The Internet.”

I was that girl. My earliest days of hunt-and-peck Internet surfing began with the now common free CD-ROM of America Online. The Internet, at once, became my meeting place, my flirting ground, my own, personal dating game. It was a conversation I could have without worrying whether I was wearing the right clothes or using the coolest slang. I would wait until late at night, log on, and could connect with virtually anyone in the realms of cyberspace. The Internet was not only a source of entertainment; it was a source of friendship, giving me those things I could not find within the walls of my high school.

The bottom line here is the attempt to understand why I hate the web these days. How did I go from calling the Internet a “friend” to loathing every minute spent stuck in it? I think somewhere between the start and finish of my undergraduate years, the Internet changed from being an organic, satisfying source of companionship and amusement to being a cold, hard tool of academia. I had to (and still have to) log on to do everything in college: check how many “Help!” emails my students have sent me; pay my bursar bill, credit card bill, transfer every last remnant of my paychecks into savings; communicate with peers and professors; research, play online Scrabble, renew library books; and the list goes on.

I spend more time in “plugged in” than I do reading, writing and conversing with humans. What does this mean? I have begun the process of rearticulating what the Internet means to me. I think for the first time, in an era of overflowing information and technology, we have the potential to use technology and not let it use us. In order for people to remain human and machines to remain as tools, we need to anticipate and address how we will change our thoughts and feelings when it comes to the Internet.