Ease of Access, It's an Addiction...

            I think I'm just across the boarder, age wise, is relationships with the internet. I don't ever remember not having it. Even back when it existed as dial-up, I still had that access to instant info. That, I feel is the greatest result of the internet: the ease of accessibility to information. This has led to a connection of ideas across a global scale. In "The Ancient Engineers" by L. Sprague De Camp, it says

A rough idea of the percentage of inventors among modern Americans can be obtained from the statistics of the United States Patent Office. The Patent Office issues about 40,000 patents every year. So we can estimate that the mid-twentieth-century American population of 180,000,000 people produced one patentable invention each year for every 4,500 citizens (de Camp 5).

This means, the more people that can connect, the more inventions can be shared. The internet is the key to make that happen.

            Having always had access to the internet, I very much rely on it. Google is my best friend. Whenever I'm curious about anything, it's so easy to ask a simple question and receive and answer. More and more, Google is improving their experience by making those simple answers the first thing that comes up in the search. I go online over and over throughout the day. Without a WiFi connection, I feel so lost.

            The internet is more durable the books in some degree, at least to my knowledge. "When travelers passed through the city of Alexandria, the king took any books they had to build up this library. He had copies of the books made to give back to the previous owners. The king wanted a universal library, containing all the books of the world. The contents of the library filled several rooms and was estimated to have three quarters of a million books. Many of these books were fragile and accidently destroyed. A greater number of them were burned in fires. Very few survived to today" (de Camp 136). All of that collected knowledge went up in smoke. 

One of the problems I do have with the internet come as a result of my personal change in relation to reality because of technology. My sense of reality started fraying when I began reading e-books. With e-books and an internet connection, it allowed for instantaneous definitions for words. More and more, I started using this feature. Now, when I'm reading physical books, if I come across I word I'd enjoy a greater understanding of, my mind goes through the mental process of looking up the word as if it were reading an e-book. Mentally, I'll long-click the word and the definition will bubble out before my eyes. I have to remind myself that you can't do that in the real world.

My second skew of reality came out of the accessibility of audiobooks due to the internet availability on mobile devices. If I ever miss something, it is so easy to rewind 30 seconds and pick up the thread again. I've found myself mentally trying to do that in classes. Sometimes, if I miss something, I almost start looking for the rewind button. Reality doesn't stop for mind train. I feel like this example is also transferable to watching shows through the internet. We no longer have to pay as much attention. Training ourselves like that interferes with our interactions with the real world.

As technology and the internet progress, you have to start to wonder, what is the "real" world? And how will that definition keep changing?