The Internet, Communication

Based on an except from an update email.

I think back on my experience on a WWOOF farm near Toledo:

Although that calm of the countryside was nice, the self-inflicted separation from the world caused by a lack of internet access was more than I would wish for again. Aside from not being able to write emails or to make Skype calls to friends and family, I was surprised at how much I desperately missed reading the blogs that I follow, world news, and the ability to look things up online. I often use the internet as a giant encyclopedia: if I want to know how to cook apple pie I search Google; if I want to know where the donuts were invented I look it up on Wikipedia; if I want to know how to translate, spell, or conjugate a particular word I crowdsource it to the internet to find out my answer. To learn a language, to read or download a book or an academic paper, to find song lyrics, to see what kind of communities are active in certain places, to compare products and prices, to look up exercises... I don't want to get all melodramatic, but the combination of innumerable resources on the internet really is almost everything for me. My time on the WWOOF farm taught me that I can live without internet access. But it also taught me how much I really do value having it. Even the times that I have been without internet access before, such as when I have moved to a new place, I have been able to get to an internet cafe or some location with a wireless network every couple of days. On the farm there weren't any places like that around, so I just had to go without. I am not going to go so far to say that life without internet access would not be worth living or anything so extreme as that, but it is easy and (for me) true to say that life without internet access would be very different and of much lower quality. The number of friends (either in the German sense of “very close and very important to me” friends or friends in a more casual sense as "someone I merely am acquainted with but whom I enjoy") I would be able to have would drop dramatically and my ability to learn about any subject area at all would be greatly lessened. These two things, (the ability to communicate with people I care about and the ability to learn (or to easily access information)) are the two main reasons that I consider access to the internet to be so important. Entertainment is there as well, but it is a very distant third after communication and learning/information.

Of course, if I chose to life a different lifestyle (and by that I mean, not a global nomad), this could greatly affect the first factor. There have been times during the past few years when I have felt like more or less of a nomad. During my senior year at Kalamazoo College I had a community of people who were physically located close to me, so I relied less on the internet for communication, since there were only a few geographically-distant people whom I was in touch with. When I lived in Beijing, I would regularly meet friends in person at juggling and improv events, or just for a meal, so the internet wasn't so terribly necessary to communicate with those friends, but I still used it intensely for information and for communicating with friends in the United States and in Europe. I assume that here in Albacete I will develop a group of contacts and friends here, and I am certainly going to try and go out more. While in China I became quite zhai, staying at home a couple nights a week and some weekends to read, watch movies, or have Skype chats. Although I don't feel that watching a movie or curling up with a book or studying at home is in anyway inferior to going out to a bar, I do feel that there is a cultural value that places going out to socialize with other people as a “higher” or a “better” things than doing something solitary at home, which makes me feel as though I need to justify myself each time I would prefer to not go out. I have to say, though: although I had loads of great times with good friends, at improv, and out on the town, one of my happiest memories of that year in Beijing was sitting at home alone on my couch, curled up with a blanket, crackers, peanut butter, and Cosmopolitanism.

But now I have people from two places in the world where I have lived in (Kalamazoo and Beijing) that I want to stay in touch with, not to mention all the people from those two places that are no longer there: friends have moved and now there are people from Seattle to Grenada to Quito, from Chicago to Beijing, from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Madrid to Moscow, all of whom that I care about and that I want to have as a part of my life. Almost every continent in the world has people I know and care about.

I am still hoping to become less zhai and more Spanish during my time here, to go out for drinks and tapas, to find/create a group of local friends, and to adapt myself to the local culture here, but I do value the relationships that I have with people from far away, and I want to keep those going.