Lately, I can’t help but be contemplative about connectivity in a world hell-bent on not connecting…

I am old enough to have been a child back when GEnie was getting started back in 1985 as an alternative to CompuServe. Basically dial-up connections to BBS’s, games, and chat rooms way, way back. It was back on GEnie that I first discovered the Science Fiction Roundtable, often thought of as a sort of unofficial SFWA chat room, and ended up chatting with some big name folks like Jerry Pournelle without knowing who some of them were. 😉

Eventually, with the creation of AOL (American Online) and Prodigy, I moved over to those and eventually, the Internet became what it is today…a wretched hive of scum and villainy.

I joke but with GenAI and misinformation everywhere, it really feels like that.

I remember when the Internet was younger…

The idea that I could use a phone connection to have access to information was huge. Mind blowing. I didn’t have to drive or walk down to a library and crawl through card catalog systems to get books and look up information. Now, I could hop “on-line,” and there it was, crawled by search engines or in online encyclopedias. I didn’t have to hand write a letter anymore if I didn’t want to. I could send an e-mail and my grandmother could read it a few hours later.

This was life-changing.

For people who weren’t around back then, you have no idea. Truly. Once things got going, the idea that anyone could have a website was wild. The idea that we could access music online… That we could even watch videos online and play games… The Internet absolutely changed the fabric of reality in ways I don’t think anyone realized it would.

The Internet had the potential to CONNECT humans like never before and that connection, in theory, should have helped us be more empathetic, not less. But somehow, being connected has given us a level of anonymity and apathy that threatens to undo us as a people.

I think our inability to foresee how much the Internet would change everything led to a lack of preparation for the consequences of unfettered information at our fingertips. The same ability to connect with anyone meant we could also hurt anyone, often with little to no consequences. (Just look at how long it took for cyberbullying to be punishable by schools.)

I don’t believe the Internet should have been regulated as being free is part of what made it so life-changing. Information should be readily available to people in any country, of any socio-economic status, though we know that’s hasn’t happened yet, not even in the United States. There are definitely still areas where poverty prevents US citizens from access to the online world. But being without any safety rails has made a place with that is more like the wild, wild west than the sci-fi utopia we all hoped it would be.

More than ever we need to be together, to think of others, and love each other. I dream of a future where that is our future and sometimes wish the Internet had never happened.

Like many things, I don’t think we as a species were ready for it.