Entry for October 30, 2008

"Internet addiction" is about to make us a nation of derelicts. Men drooling over online pornography, women abandoning their husbands for chat-room lovers ...." I don't know about that, but an online existence can be socially connecting and isolating at the same time, which is pretty much a conundrum.

I find it interesting the number of people prowling the web for victims, whatever their game...sometimes just head games, other times more sinister. Actually interesting isn't the right word, more like revolting, angering. Why?

Because what started as a tool for the Pentagon*, has met the future. On the one side planet wide access to advanced medical care, instant communication of written and spoken words, ideas, images...and on the other hand, crime, psycho cyber junkies using advanced skills to steal information.

And then there is identity.

Who is who, and where are they on the globe? Is that woman I chatted with an hour ago really in Miami, or Paris, Moscow, or Hong Kong? Or was she a kid pretending out of her bedroom in Dayton?

Or maybe some sleazo in a rundown tenement on a old PC using dialup and a webcam to see some titties? Oh!

Its enough to make you want to sell you PC and go back to the old...nawww, we'll just have to deal with it.

(the Internet -the first two nodes of what would become the ARPANET were interconnected between UCLA and SRI International in Menlo Park, California, on October 29, 1969. )