That Crazy Crazy Internet Thing

So I’ve been online since 1995 — not as early as the true pioneers but still, a little ahead of the curve. Mostly I just live, breathe, and work on the Internet, a fully immersed cyber citizen who ’t stop to gawk at surroundings that have been familiar to me for going on fourteen years. But I had one of those moments recently where, instead of just living it and being it and doing it, I stepped back and had a nanosecond glimpse of how very much this thing has changed, and continues to change our lives.

Tangent time: A long, long time ago, I was part of Austin’s poetry slam scene. And it used to chap me when people would get up and perform pieces about slam poetry. What do you call that when you write about what you write about? (And yes, I’m sure I’ve been guilty of the same — in fact, did I not just write here about how I used to write poetry? Guilty!)

Anyway, I mention that because maybe it’s just some recent case of heightened awareness on my part, but I feel like I have read about nine hundred articles in the past week about the Internet. And yes, I read them on the Internet. But the difference between reading about the net on the net and hearing poetry about poetry is that I actually find the former fascinating.

Some examples are below. Granted I don’t think any of these are brand brand new, cutting edge uses of the Internet. But they are moving from the margins to the center, catching on to the point that New York Times is reporting on them. In fact, of the following, all but one came to my attention via NYT online and, though it’s the paper of note and all that, most anyone will tell you by the time they get their hands on a story, it’s probably been covered before in smaller media outlets. That is, Times coverage is often proof of arrival in the mainstream.

Transforming Art Into a More Lucrative Career Choice
This story highlights how artists, including a 14 year-old custom guitar maker, are using marketing tools — yes, a lot of Web 2.0 stuff — to actually make a living with their art.

You’re Leaving a Digital Trail. What About Privacy?
Exciting, scary excerpt from that story: Propelled by new technologies and the Internet’s steady incursion into every nook and cranny of life, collective intelligence offers powerful capabilities, from improving the efficiency of advertising to giving community groups new ways to organize. But even its practitioners acknowledge that, if misused, collective intelligence tools could create an Orwellian future on a level Big Brother could only dream of.

Grandpa’s On the Computer Screen
A whole generation of kids is now growing up with cyber grandparents — that is, they’re communicating with tools like Skype and webcams to share virtual playtime with grandparents who, in an earlier era would have to either visit in person or totally miss out.

In Lean Times, Online Coupons are Catching On
Tips on how to get the very best deals and discounts by tracking down coupon codes for online shopping sites.

Cyber Monday Crashes an Online-Shopping Tradition
Apparently there’s an online answer to Black Friday, supposedly the biggest shopping day of the year. According to this post, online retailers slash prices on the Monday after Thanksgiving so folks returning to work resentfully after four days off will have something to do in their cubicles. But there’s a downside — crashing retailer sites galore.

Citizen Journalists Provide Glimpses of Mumbai Attacks
This is an example — Hurricane Ike coverage was another recent one — of how regular people caught in crisis situations are informing the official media with instant updates. It also shows how Twitter has gone from being sort of silly to capable of being a really powerful tool in an emergency.

A Penny for My Thoughts?
Maureen Dowd’s recent column about how some editor in Pasadena fired his hometown staff and is now outsourcing local news reporting to journalists (some not trained as such) in India willing to write for an nth of a percentage of what their predecessors were paid.

I could go on. There’s the story of how Turkey has banned YouTube and how Google (owner of YouTube) has to decide what to post and what to prohibit. There’s the story about how books, most of them anyway, are going away but how this might not be the most awful thing in the world for writers. (I liked that piece, of course.) And the recently settled case of the woman who used MySpace to torture her daughter’s classmate, which, it was alleged, drove the classmate to suicide.

It is, for me, so cool to be witnessing such rapid growth — some of it obviously painful and deviant but so much more of it productive — of this technology over such a short period of time. Like watching a time-lapse image of a blooming flower back in fifth grade science class.

At the risk of sounding like an old biddy, I remember when technological advances were marked by the invention of a telephone cord that could reach all the way across the room so you could simultaneously talk on the phone and cross over to the eight-track player to turn it down. Now this Internet thing? By comparison? Crazy, crazy horse of a different color.

Tacos & Internet photo by dro!d