We take a lot of things for granted, and we can only realize how important they are when we don't have them anymore. It is such a routine act for millions of people in the world to turn on their computer and connect to the internet automatically. Just think about a world without internet, what if you were denied internet access for the rest of your life? How different would your life be? Few centuries ago, people didn't have internet, did they lack something in their lives? Was something missing? I remember talking about how growing up I had penpals from different countries and how excited I was whenever I was receiving their letters through the mail. We used to exchange postcards and pictures by mail. Those were the times when the Post Office actually meant something, it was our way to connect to people regardless of where they lived. Checking your mailbox was exciting because you were not just expecting bills and marketing flyers, you knew you would get that letter from your long lost cousin, you knew your grandmother might send you a postcard of her last vacation. Handwriting was a skill, it was an art that we used proudly.
Today, everything is typed, rarely do we exercise our right to write. Journals barely exist, we blog :) We don't make beautiful collages in notebooks and write poems under them, scrapbooks have become an art of the past. We use Flickr and Picassa, it's so much easier, we copy and paste! When we don't like something, it's easy to get rid of it, just click on CTR+ALT+DEL! We don't need to smile, we can just insert a smilie :) We don't carry bags of memories with us, we put them in folders on our harddrive. Sometimes our computer gets a virus and we lose everything and it feels like our house's been destroyed in a fire. Cellphones are so much convenient than the old adress books. How many of us have lost our phones and felt miserable not for the loss of the phone itself but the long time acquired contact list?
We live in an e-world where we are free to express ourselves! It's a free speech zone and sometimes we don't care about the person on the other side of the screen. Truth is, we never met them, why should we care? They're just a digital name on our screen, we are free to treat them as spam. There is indeed a power in anonymity that can lead to a lack of authorial integrity. Because we are anonymous, we are not accountable for our non ethical behavior, we lose our moral responsibility. We are anonymous because we don't want to be associated with our own comments. There is still this hypocrisy to appear truthful and respectful to the people who know us out of our e-world.
After all, no matter how hard we virtualize ourselves, the real world is still there, waiting for us, harsh and judgemental. We can't escape from our reality. The question remains,aren't we becoming robots by virtualizing ourselves, our lives and every little need we have? We shop online, take classes online, put our pictures online, tell the stories of our lives, make friends.... But at the end of the day, when we turn our laptop off, do we also turn the virtual world off? Do we forget about the blogs, the shops and the people we met in our virtual world? Are we so powerful that we can turn on and off an entire world in our mind? How amazing would that be? The truth is, we can never turn that world off, we can never forget about all the rantings and ravings, we can never get so powerful that we can just turn off every little virtual knowledge we've acquired during the days, months, years. And the reason being: we always come back! We always find somewhere, somehow, the need , that voyeurism to just turn our computers on, and enter into that virtual world. Are we all voyeurs?*btw, at least I can't turn this digital world on and off coz I find myself thinking about fellow bloggers in my real life wondering what they're doing at this present moment. Truth is I had a dream about Mona few days ago ( can't remember what it was about)but I was really surprised when I woke up. Why would you dream about people you've never met before?*
