"That which you are seeking is causing you to seek," a Zen master once told me. Seems like I've been searching, and waiting, all my life for something like the World Wide Web. Now, here it is and here am I, a forty-something baby-boomer happily adrift in Cyberspace.
Access to the Internet has become an everyday, if extraordinary, part of my life. It affects my life in ordinary ways, but the way in which it does always amazes me.
In observation of the "24 Hours in Cyberspace" project, which took place on February 8, 1996, I signed my name to the wall of this digital cave, then recorded my thoughts about the Internet phenomenon. These are the thoughts that commemorated the day, with a few updates.
I first went online in 1989 with my Tandy (8088) laptop, a 2400 Baud modem, and the PC-Link network, which eventually became part of America Online. It was a tremendously exciting way to make contact with people, archaic and outmoded as it seems now.
For all the multimedia bells and whistles available on the WWW, it's still the connectivity that excites me, connecting to people and sharing ideas. I can work alone in my home office without feeling isolated. And, for the first time in my life, I'm beginning to have a sense that I am a member of the human family; a citizen of Planet Earth.
I'm a freelance science writer, and Cyberspace is where I do most of my work these days. I can do research, make contact with my sources, get information from them, and have them review material for fact-checking -- all in a matter of minutes or hours. Articles get sent to editors via e-mail and we can do a round of edits and re-edits in a matter of hours, something that used to take days or weeks.
Internet access has saved my rear end on a couple of occasions. When I found myself without a file compression program, and a client on his way over to pick up a file too big to put on a diskette in its uncompressed state, I was able to go online, do a search, find out where I could download a copy, and download it. By the time my client arrived, about 20 minutes later, I had the file zipped on stored on a disk. He got a finished job, I got my check.
Last week I found myself having problems with the computer. I had no anti-virus program (dumb, I know), so went online to find one. After finding and downloading a copy, I fired it up and sure enough, found a Stealth_C virus hiding in my boot sector. Within 15 minutes of downloading the software, the virus was gone and my computer was restored to its otherwise pristine state.
Because of the people I've been meeting on the WWW, I'm currently putting together a proposal for a book about Quaker (Monk) Parakeets. Both the motivation and the resources have been coming through my Internet contacts. I may make a living from this yet.
For the past five years, access to computer networks and the Internet have
given me contact with far-flung relatives I'd rarely hear from otherwise.
I've gotten to know my brothers a lot better through e-mail. They
won't write letters, but they'll respond to e-mail. And we're hearing
more from our nephews and nieces as they grow up and go online.
The McGleish Clan
Left to right starting with the back row
nephew Kelly (Bud & Shirley's youngest), brothers Bud and Carey
My mother, Mary Jane (center).
Sister-in-law Shirley, sister Donna, and me.
In the final months of my mother's life, in 1991, she and I were able to keep in touch on a more intimate basis through e-mail. I also developed several friends through a computer network whose daily messages gave me constant support throughout my mother's bout with cancer. I've met several of them face-to-face since then. And yes, there really are people behind the words and graphics on my screen.
Everyone in our families, both mine and my husband's, has access to e-mail
now, and we get mail on an almost weekly basis from them. Most of
us have web sites as well. Messages are becoming increasingly multimedia
too. We now exchange sound files of happy birthday greetings and
recordings of the new things our pet parrots are saying. I also find
that my husband is very responsive to e-mail. At least it gets
him home for dinner more reliably than nagging phone calls.
The Carr Clan
Left to right starting with the back row
in-laws Jim & Carilon, husband Jim and me.
Niece Becky, Jim's brother Tom and his wife Janet, nephew Andrew, niece
Jennifer
(The kids all belong to Tom and Jan)
I've become interested in Buddhism the past two years. I went to a Zen retreat in North Carolina in April 1995 and left hungering for more. I did a search when I got back home, wondering if Buddhists were on the Internet. Boy, are they ever. Although I do sitting meditations with Cypress Tree, a local zen group affiliated with the Kwan Um Zen School, I've found tremendous riches in the online sources with which I've connected.
Everything else aside, surfing the net is just plain fun. I love the diversity I find, even if it occasionally disgusts me, and I love stopping off somewhere and making friends with a total stranger, if only for a short time. But I do that in Realspace as well as in Cyberspace. My favorite thing to do is to make random connections through some search engine and see where I end up.
