Comments on: Why I like the internet.

By: Joanie

Joanie — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 15:38:08 +0000

I’ll be honest (and maybe a little pathetic) and say if it wasn’t for the internet my social life would be basically non-existant. As a stay at home mom I don’t get out much. I also live in a town where I know pretty much no one, and the people I do know I wish I didn’t. The internet has allowed me to connect with like-minded people and we do greatly enjoy each others company, such as it is. It also allows me to keep in touch with my two older sisters who live so far away that I barely get to see them anymore.

I love the internet.
.-= Joanie´s last blog ..Husband of the Year =-.

By: Jess

Jess — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 12:50:59 +0000

I agree with a lot of this. I like being able to share my opinions, and also being able to document my life… and I know I could write this stuff on paper, but paper has no Ctrl+F capabilities! And also, paper is easily lost or damaged, while files on the internet tend to be more resilient for my purposes.

I’m not sure about the twenty-first century necessarily being an easy period to research just because of the internet. It depends on how much of the content now on the internet survives and is archived for future generations, and how much simply vanishes. It also depends on whether the infrastructure keeps working — it’s possible that through unsustainable use of resources, societies will simply run out of fuel for electricity to even have an internet, and then the twenty-first century could be a dark age in terms of information available. Resources that are valuable to historians, like diaries and letters, have now become blogs and emails, and if the internet no longer exists centuries from now…

On the other hand, one could compare the survival of emails to the survival of letters: it’s not like every letter ever written survived, far from it. It’s an interesting topic, though.
.-= Jess´s last blog ..Murray-Darling Basin Revolution + GTAV’s map-making skills =-.

By: Emily

Emily — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 04:30:56 +0000

You’re not alone. I have no problem talking with people on the internet. I met one of my best friends through a roleplaying community. She lived on the opposite side of the country until this year (college started for her. She’s more like 3/4 of the country away now.) and we have never met or heard the other one’s voice but I have no problem telling her things I can’t tell my best friend of 11 years who lives down the street from me.

By: Chris Blake

Chris Blake — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 02:31:41 +0000

Where am I? I’m trying to order pizza online.

By: Katharine Berry

Katharine Berry — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 01:18:11 +0000

I wonder if you're aware of what "meme" meant before the internet hijacked the word… Of course, there's a decent change that in the year 3009, the hard disks containing everything ever will have died or we won't know how to read them, or your files will be in some obscure format nobody can read. I find it more likely nobody will know anything about this period of time. (Given that it's very difficult to retrieve files from the 1980s, hundreds or thousands of years could be a problem, especially given that magnetic storage has a lifetime measured in decades, even if not used, and optical storage is not all that much better) .-= Katharine Berry´s last blog ..Twitterbot for Plurk =-.

By: Solnushka

Solnushka — Wed, 02 Dec 2009 23:57:53 +0000

I have a diary from when I was about seven which They made us keep at school as a way of practsing handwriting. Or at least I do if my Mum hasn’t put that in the garage too to moulder and rot. It’s very twitteresque really in that it says things like ‘My tooth fell out today. There was a lot of blood’. Generally there’s a little stick drawing of a small Solnushka spewing blood or whatever. But the odd thing is how much I remember when I read the entries.

Mind you, I’m quite glad my teenage diaries aren’t online.
.-= Solnushka´s last blog ..On advent calendars. =-.