It wasn't long after we were connected that I found my first Internet fetish, when I signed up to play an online role playing MUD, or a "multi-user dungeon." Who can say how many hundreds of hours I spent in that alternate reality? It was during those first few years as a Internet user that I developed the same annoying and somewhat unhealthy dependence on technology, and particularly the Internet. I fell prey to all the early Web phenomena, including intimate conversations online with people I had never met. I loaned my online friends money to go to college, and even ended up meeting not a few of them in "real life."
As I've gotten older, I've tried to curb the urges for technological gratification I nourished for so many years. I've attempted to use the Internet via more responsible and constructive avenues, including a Weblog of my travels in Europe and of my everyday epiphanies. While living in Europe I used the Net to keep in touch with my actual friends back home, rather than random and perfect strangers, and since I've come back I've tried to maintain a healthy and faithful correspondence with the friends I made abroad.
I think the Net can be useful and truly a boon to us in many ways, including enhancing relationships when they are already founded on something more substantial than virtual reality. A good example is the social networking site Facebook. While indeed I have my qualms with the site, and just how nosy it makes its users, I've found that it can truly be a lot of fun for those who use it to keep in touch. Through Facebook I've been able to keep up with friends who would have otherwise been lost to time and distance long ago, and I've had multiple opportunities to interject moments of random hilarity in the lives of friends more close in proximity.
When it comes to education, it's hard to imagine any system of learning that does not include computers and all their adjunct technology. As pervasive as something like the Internet is in our society, and apparently growing ever more so, it seems to me that we as educators must teach our students how to use this technology expediently, but also so that it reinforces our responsibilities toward each other as humans and affirms human dignity. There are difficult conversations regarding the current trend of our Web technology, for instance, that need to happen but seem all too often to be excluded from the curriculum. I have particularly in mind here the absent dialogue regarding the role of pornography in our society and its impact on our perceptions of humanity and the respect due to every human, no matter how beautiful or desirable to the eye. Are our children being engaged in the process of learning in schools how to use technology in such a way that they will be equipped to make the right decision when they will ultimately (and inevitably) be confronted online with material that compromises their innocence, how they look at the opposite sex, or how they view their own bodies?
This is just one example of an ongoing conversation that needs to take place when we embark on teaching our students the fundamentals of technology, which I feel is sadly all too often neglected to the detriment of childrens' mind and our common future as a society of technological consumers.
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