One of the rallying cries of the luddites among us is that personal relationships and human interaction are slowing being replaced with increased solitary computer use. Rather than interacting with the people around us, the world is becoming less personal as computers increasingly invade our homes & lives.
I beg to differ. My experience has been exactly the opposite... technology has facilitated relationships where otherwise there might have been none.
One of the great aspects of the internet is that it's very easy to set up "communities" of people with similar interests. We own two Pembroke Welsh Corgi's, and hence ended up joining the Corgi-L mailing list (1) which has around 1000 members world-wide. Shortly after making a post or two, I received private email from another member who as it turned out, was not only local but remembered me from grade school. She,. in turn, was a member of a small group of local Corgi owners that periodically got together at a nearby park. So within a few short weeks of having joined this virtual community, we made very real contact and found ourselves in a local park, in the midst of a dozen happy dogs & owners.
There are virtual communities for just about any interest you might imagine. My wife is a doll collector and owns a doll shop. She uses the internet, email and various on-line communities not only to stay in contact with customers, but also to cull information and bring it to her shop to better serve her customers. The relationships formed at the shop, both customers and friends, benefit from the ease of increased contact and her ability to have information at hand that her clientele share an interest in.
Those concerned about technology blanch at relationships which are formed between people who've never actually met. I regularly use newsgroups(2) or bulletin boards of various forms to discuss and stay up to date on various topics of interest, from specific technologies such as satellite TV, to humor, to various information forums at work. In many cases, ongoing relationships result between people that have never met.
Over the past couple of years, we've had some friends move away from the area. In the past, this would typically mean that communication would be restricted to the occasional letter and Christmas card. As it turns out email helps these relationships continue at a more reasonable pace. Certainly it's not the same as "being there", but monthly, weekly, or even sometimes daily contact via email has allowed those relationships to not just continue, but to thrive in new ways. Add to that the recent affordability of digital photography, and information and photos are being exchanged at rates that paper-and-prints letters simply would not have afforded.
Email has also allowed us to reconnect with former friends and relatives that, otherwise, would probably have been lost in the mists of time, distance and memory. The most extreme case resulted in my visiting Holland last year for the first time in over two decades. As part of that trip I visited my two surviving aunts, and reacquainted myself with locations and history with a lot of personal meaning. And this never would have happened had I not, a few years ago, begun exchanging email with a cousin of mine. (Since that time, we've also played with chat and video-conferencing(3), both of which work amazingly well cross-planet.)
During each trip I make overseas, I communicate with my wife daily. Irrespective of time zones and whatever else is going on, an email a day lets her know what's going on. For my most recent trip, I went one step further and with my digital camera in hand, I updated my web site daily. This allowed not only her, but anyone else who was interested to see the trip's progress as it was happening.
There's actually very little on the internet that wasn't already possible in one form or another before. I certainly could have been better about writing letters to my cousin and other friends, and we could have joined a local Corgi-owners or doll-collector's clubs that had regular meetings. I could have been calling my wife daily and my trip photos could easily have waited until several days after I returned.
But we, and a lot of people, didn't join clubs. And we were never very good about writing letters. And the trip pictures, while interesting, are "old news" by the time the film's developed and the prints make it around to whomever we happen to visit.
The internet and the technology behind it is making it significantly easier, more convenient and faster to communicate and share ideas and information. People are much more likely to put off writing a letter than dashing off a quick email. That local Corgi club might be part of a larger world-wide organization, but passing information to all 1,000 members would take a fairly massive (and time consuming) effort; today I and all the others do it in seconds. Clubs meet on their schedule, not mine. I can take a picture and have my cousin on the other side of the planet see it in seconds, rather than days or weeks.
Rather than isolating us, I believe that the internet is making the world much smaller, and bringing more people together, more quickly and more easily than ever before.
Leo A. Notenboom
May 8, 2001
Notes:
1: A "mailing list" is simply a way of distributing email to many people who are "members" of that list. When I send a piece of mail to Corgi-L, it is eventually received by the nearly 1000 members of the list. Mailing lists are often moderated to ensure that discussion remains relevant (for example Corgi-L mails must be approved by a moderator), and are also often presented in multiple forms: one email per message, one email at the end of the day containing all messages that were sent that day, called a digest, or in some cases, the messages are made available on a web page.
2: A "newsgroup" differs from a mailing list primarily by how messages are retrieved. Strictly speaking, newsgroups are a type of technology used to collect and distribute messages, typified by the "usenet", a global collection of tens of thousands of news groups on every imaginable topic, and then some. The term "bulletin board" is also used to refer to the family of technologies that include the usenet, "groups" (such as groups.yahoo.com), on-line "communities" (e.g. communities.msn.com), "forums" (e.g. www.delphi.com) and any place where messages can be "posted". Much like a real-life bulletin board, messages are "posted" to a central location, and in order to read the messages, those that want to must visit the bulletin board and read the messages posted there.
3: "Chat" is simply a technology where you see what others type, and they see what you type. My experience was person-to-person, but larger "chat rooms" exist where people can chat about most any topic. Chat differs from email and bulletin boards in that it happens as you type, where email and bulletin boards are delayed by either delivery or your own personal convenience. "Video conferencing" is exactly what it implies...with an inexpensive video camera, microphone and speakers, it's very much like the videophone's we were promised 20 years ago.
Copyright © 2001 Leo A. Notenboom
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