Hello friends. Want to hear a joke?
There are 10 kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who do not.
Hahaha.
Those who have completely digitalized their lives find it hard to part from their computers, for their whole life is stored in the hard drives of the magical shiny box. Everything from precious family photos, movies and music, to important receipts and documents, class notes and essays, and academic journals in progress, is digitalized, and there may not even be a hard copy of the documents existing in real life.
Computers not only store information in a small, compact space, but they are the plastic and metal gateways to the Internet (insert holy music here). The Internet is collaborative and isolating, inclusive and exclusive. It is wondrous and infinite, mysterious and elite. It can be described by so many adjectives, but no one adjective can completely describe it. It is simply a digital entity that we have come to love, hate, love to hate, and hate to love.
Ahh, the joys of the Internet. It is a source of knowledge, information, communication, enlightenment, and entertainment. For digital natives like myself - and even digital immigrants, too - it is a luxury that we have grown accustomed to having and may even take for granted.
So imagine my pain and sorrow, when I could no longer connect to my wireless network at home. Suddenly, I was disconnected, disoriented. I was... disengaged. I was... disengaged? I was disengaged.
My connection to the outside world was cut. I longed for the attention of Facebook, telling me to connect with my friends - the acquaintances from highschool that I had brief encounters with in my life and don’t really care about until now - to tell me what they are up to at this moment in time. My heart stopped when I realized that I could no longer see the smiling faces of Shaycarl’s family that I’ve come to recognize as my own. There was no magic in my life, no Chocolate Rain, no double rainbows. I could no longer follow the urls to enlightenment, to ask for direction and pray to my God, Google.
Yes, those were exaggerations and meant to be funny. But really, I felt so naked and so empty. Without connection to wireless Internet, Clyde is not much more than a fancy, overpriced, oversized paperweight. Okay fine, I’ll give him more credit than that. He’s a great storage unit and he can do word processing. But that’s pretty much it. Without wireless Internet, I was so lost. I couldn’t do research for my essays. I couldn’t download lecture materials or watch my online lectures without the Internet. However, where convenience was lost, I gained productivity. Instead of “connecting” with my “friends” or watching pointless viral videos, I focused on my readings and took notes diligently.
I even got up and looked up a word in the dictionary - an action that I can’t even remember the last time that I’ve done. The binding smelt so old and strangely familiar. My fingers gripped the gently used pages cautiously, afraid of ripping the frail newsprint, then I flipped the pages confidently to the word in question, and I pointed my finger triumphantly at the word, pleased that I still remembered how to use this ancient piece of technology.
I looked at the meaning of the word, then furrowed my eyebrows at the definition. The definition had another word that puzzled me. Ah ha! This was another chance to prove my spectacular page-flipping skills. And pages were flipped. Then I decided to have some fun and opened it to a random page. I pointed my finger at a random word and read its definition. I looked at the surrounding words and looked at their definitions. I flipped and flipped, entertaining myself with these new words and acronyms that I didn’t know existed. Complicated definitions led me to look up more words, and those words led me to look up even more words. I lost track of time until I saw the word - computer. It reminded me of why I picked up the dictionary in the first place. It saddened me again, knowing that I was not connected to the Internet, but at the same time, it made me nostalgic of the times that I used to do this regularly for fun. All of these feelings mixed around inside of me, then, as if a lightbulb lit up inside my brain, I realized how similar my actions with the dictionary was to my behaviour with Wikipedia. On Wikipedia, I can search for one thing, then follow the links to another page and keep going and going and going. Similarly with the dictionary, I can look up a puzzling word, which will lead me to look up another word, and my eyes will wander around the page looking for more words to look at. I was impressed with this revelation. Wikipedia and the dictionary are not so different, after all. Life can - and does - go on without technology.
At that point, I was smug. Sometimes I forget that there is a real world on the other side of the drywall and peeling paint. I crawled out of my bat cave and went outside to feel the fresh air stinging my skin and sunlight flooding into my eyes for the first time in ages.
When I got to the point where I finished everything that didn’t require the use of the Internet, I fished out my trusty ethernet cable and connected to the Internet. Unfortunately, that meant that I was unable to get Internet access from anywhere I wanted in the house, because I was limited to the length of the cable. This was a luxury that I will have to deal with until I get my wireless problem fixed. I had to sacrifice physical mobility in order to reach my digital destination.
Needless to say, I was unhappy with this situation. I was tethered to the wall by a 5 foot short cable, like a pet leashed to her owner. Like a prisoner bound to the cell wall. Like an unborn baby attached to her mother by a thin umbilical cord, feeding her the packets of information that she so greedily craves to keep her digital life alive.
Isn’t that what we are? Aren’t we just like babies - naive, unsure of the world around us - connected to our all-knowing mother, the Internet, through a series of networked cables that feed information to our hungry, curious minds? In my case, the cable is dusty and grey.
We are collecting information, non-stop, trying to organize the world’s knowledge into a database that we can easily access. We are so absorbed in making this infinite Tower of Babel that we feel disoriented when we no longer have access to it. Is this controlling our life, or are we controlling the life that we are living in? Are all our efforts put into the quest for unbounded knowledge that our lives are centred around it? Does my ethernet cable constrain and dictate what I do, or am I in control of when and where I have Internet?
Maybe the joke that I told at the beginning of this blog isn’t really a joke, afterall. There are those who understand binary, and those who don’t. We can break down the information that we have found into a series of ones and zeros that the machine can understand, so that it may take that information and catalogue it for us. Humans may think that they are both types of people in this world since they programed the binary code into the machine, but the majority of us have no clue what’s going on. It’s a dying language for the humans, and it’s just the beginning of life for the machines. Machines will still stand when we die. It is all knowing and it knows nothing.
Stay connected,
Bonnie and Clyde, the 10 types of people in this world.
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