This is a rant

deadspeaker wonders in a recent post what she's doing on the Internet, and seems to think that she's somehow failing at life by not just walking away from it. Because it's, you know, not real.

Fuck that.

The Internet is communication. That's all it is. A way of sending information from one place to lots of other places. And that is a huge and wonderful thing.

It's the information we take in that makes us who we are. Our personalities are shaped by and our actions determined by what we know, what we have felt and who we have talked to. The more we learn about the world around us, the greater our awareness of the huge amount of choice we have, and the more options are open to us. Knowing more, being aware of people in other places and situations, that makes us greater.

I was hooked on the Net from the first time back in 1990 when I had an entire conversation with someone on another continent in an afternoon. During the first USA-Iraq war in 1991 I first truly felt that the Net was something new and fantastic, when I sat in my safe little room in Linköping and followed over IRC the thoughts and feelings of a few students at Ben Gurion University in Jerusalem, and I truly worried when they had to leave their terminals because the air raid sirens went off. That wasn't just a notice on CNN about war in a far-off land, that was people I had been talking to in danger of their lives. The difference in emotional impact between those two is enormous, and the latter could never have existed without the Net. The same thing holds true to this day. It's much, much harder to be indifferent to news when it's happening to someone you know. I may never have physically met them, but so what? If we'd met, we'd pretty much only have talked anyway. We can do that just as well (sometimes better, for people with certain physical handicaps) this way.

How, if not for the Net, would I have been able to not notice that trixieleitz moved halfway across the Earth without losing contact with her? How could I possibly have even a vague idea what it's like to be a young woman in Singapore? Or a feminist activist in Malaysia? A professional writer, in Edinburgh or Baltimore? Just plain ordinary people living in London or California or New Orleans or Sydney or Oslo or Tokyo or Edmonton or Antwerp or Madrid or Sao Paolo or New York ot Vienna or...

Claiming that this wealth of contact with different experience is inferior to limiting your experience to your own close social, economic and geographical environment is the voice of the utterly reactionary, the ones desperately afraid of new input and change. By disparaging the new, they seek to retain the old.

It's not like our contacts stay on the Net, either. If not for the Net, I'd never have ended up dating a woman in England. I'd never have sat in the back of a bookshop in San Antonio with a bunch of Texas wiccans comparing our vastly different experiences of belonging to a non-mainstream religion (and, boy, am I happy I don't live there!). I'd never have sat in a back yard in Nottingham talking about Blake's 7. I'd never have met my wife (we first met on alt.sysadmin.recovery).

When my grandparents grew up, pretty much their total environment was the villages where they were born, and those within a day or two of travel by human- or horse-powered conveyance (cars were for the rich back then). All the people they could share experience with lived in those areas.

When my parents grew up, cars were common. Air travel was getting practical. Television gave a one-way view of far-away places. They could share experience with a much larger part of this country, and even get a glimpse of other countries.

I can talk to people across most the of the planet. The number of people who I can potentially share experience with is about four orders of magnitude larger than those my grandfather could potentially share experience with when he was the age I am now – and all of that is because of the Net.

So people around you think you're strange because you spend time on the Internet. Well, they're right. To them, you are strange. You have stepped outside their world. You have experience an environment they now nothing of. And as with everything we experience, it has changed you. You are larger than you were. You are larger than they can be, as long as they don't also step outside.

You spend time on the Internet? Great. Welcome to all of the Earth.