Merely Mere

So this is my first blog post. I’m not completely certain what to write since this is my first blog for school. But I’m not completely new to this either…the whole writing thing. I’ve always kept journals. I use them mostly for a place with no rules; a place for my ranting rambles, sketches, poetry and things that just don’t make any sense. I will try to avoid this messiness in this blog. But I can’t completely garentee that I won’t ramble…that comes naturally to me in these types of things.

Well, the other night I happened to open my book The New Media Reader for class. I was doing the reading and found myself going on a tangent in my head about the internet. The book describes the “digital medium” as being many things, including the internet. I thought that it was funny to describe the internet itself as a medium. It made me think about art class when the professor asks you to describe the “medium” that you have used: acrylic paint, pen and ink, charcoal, blood & tears, mixed media, or anything else. But the internet? I feel like I would accused of plagiarism if I gave that answer. Certainly the use of computers has become a medium for art, but the internet? The book further convinced me how the internet is a form of expression….different from just going on it to check your e-mail. Everything these days ends up being related to the internet.

The introductory reading also reminded me of something we talked about the first day of class and in many other classes here at Mary Washington: how much people are dependent on the internet in todays society. It certainly isn’t always dependable and I find it funny how much it surrounds our life. Over break my house didn’t have internet for two days. When the internet first came down, My mom was running around pulling cords from our router in the basement (my mother is not very computer savvy) trying to fix the problem…so she could finish her work. Of course this did not help the temporary intenet problem, but made it worse when she started inverting unknown cords. The next day were awful, my parents were offline and clueless. My mom finally found a way to check her work e-mail over the phone by talking to a robot that didn’t know what she was saying when she screamed “skip” into the phone reciever. My dad found himself re-treating in his office away from home so that he can use the internet there. They discovered ways to get around not having internet two days….well, sorta. Finally, after talking to the Comcast Gods for two hours on the phone, it turns out that the IP address got messed up on our modem for our computers and that we were entitled for a new free modem since ours was so old. The Comcast people came to my house and replaced our old one. Problem solved. But it scary to think how much the world comes to an end when theres no internet. Have we all really become so internet dependent?

Well, maybe next time I’ll talk about class related things more…