I was 13 years old the first time I ever realized what sort of potential the internet held as a vast array of naked ladies. Some of you may not remember 1995 very well but it feels like talking about living in a time without air conditioning or indoor plumbing. Dial-up modems boasted a blazing 56 kilobit per second speed, but in rural suburbs like the one I lived in, you were doing good if you hit 20. Currently, as I type, my thoughts are being translated to internet fodder at the rate of 30 megabits per second, a difference on an exponential scale.
To give you an analogy, the national maximum speed limit in 1995 was 65 miles per hour. If the speed limit from then to now was raised proportionally with the speed of internet access, that would make the speed limit more than 97,000 miles per hour. At that speed, you could fly to the moon at its farthest orbital position from Earth in a little over two and a half hours. To put that in perspective, the fastest recorded launch of any man-made object was just over 37,000 miles an hour and took more than eight hours to pass the moon. I don't want to seem like an agist or an anti-technologist, but when you look at it this way, it's kind of scary. "Reckless endangerment" doesn't even begin to describe the idea of someone driving 97,000 miles an hour. "Impossibly unfathomable" seems a bit closer, but then again, it's not that impossible when it comes to other aspects of our daily lives.
Think about this: 50 years ago, cell phones didn't exist. The closest we came was a phone-system that could be installed in a car. It weighed 88 pounds and cost God-only-knows how much. The rest of the world had to either put a quarter in a pay phone or wait until they got home to make a call. Today, people are shelling out $100 or less for phones that they give to their 12 year-old that have just as much processing power and access to the internet as a home computer ten years ago. Again, not to sound like an agist, but you think that doesn't change people? You think there are no repercussions to this?
It's a lot like puberty, if you think about it. Your body starts initiating the process of adulthood, but your brain is just confused. What's happening to me? Where did that come from? Why am I so different all of a sudden? You're not really sure what's happening, but you're being flooded with all of these new sensations and urges and things don't make sense the way they used to. You need somebody to come along and explain everything to you. It's okay. You're not sick. You're not dying. Your body is changing. This is your new reality.
But it's also not like puberty. It's not organic. It doesn't happen gradually. There's a buy-in required where contracts get signed and money gets spent. Technology has become such a part of our culture that you're almost unable to participate in society unless you have the latest gadget or you join the newest network. But only almost. There are ways around it, a la my experiment last month, and when you get down to brass tacks, your cable/internet bill can't really be considered a necessity. It's something akin to a bed: you can't really imagine not having one to sleep on, but people still slept just fine until mattresses were invented.
I guess, what I'm trying to get at without waxing philosophical (and I'm not sure I'm succeeding), is the idea that our desires to increase productivity and efficiency are just one small step removed from greed. While I definitely believe that the Internet is one of the greatest blessings that comes from living in a developed country, the desire to speed things up has brought us to a place of either not considering or ignoring the consequences.
When I was 13 years-old, I got the idea to look at porn from watching television. I don't really know why, but I was watching Entertainment Tonight or some other ridiculous late-night entertainment news show, and they ran a story about Anna Nicole Smith. Her gross, old, rich Uncle Pennybags husband had just died and they were discussing the fortune she was on track to receive as a part of it, but they kept showing all of these "tastefully" censored pictures from her (then recent) days as a Playboy model. They kept flashing a website on the screen that said "for the full story, visit..." and rather than changing the channel or going to bed, I let the thought fester until it led to another thought, and then another, and then... well, you get the idea.
I don't really know why I'm telling you all this or what difference I hope it makes for me to talk about it. It's hard for me to look back on that moment as anything other than a starting point for something I wish never existed, or the day that something inside of me that should've grown and flourished into full maturity got poisoned. I brought up all that other stuff to illustrate how the world keeps marching on around me, even though I'm sometimes not prepared for it to, and how much it serves to make those dark little corners of my life feel like the only safe places I have; places where, sure, everything's a mess and, if I'm honest, I hate it, but everything else just feels so scary and unpredictable.
But I'm as much a perpetrator as I am a victim and I can't really decide what I hate more: the things I've let happen or the things I've done. I don't really know what the solution should be, but as I look back on the history of it, it makes perfect sense that I ended up where I ended up. When you think about the progression of technology as a parallel to my addiction, my parents letting me keep a computer in my bedroom was basically like letting me sleep with a loaded gun in my mouth. Not that I think they really knew or suspected that it was even possible for me to be as neck-deep in it as I was and, at the time, password protection and filtering software was virtually unheard of.
I guess this is why I gravitate so readily to the biblical idea of forgiveness. God never seems to diminish the "badness" of our sin in any way, but he also doesn't really seem to want to dwell that much on the hows and whys of it, either. It's like he asks us to agree with him that it's disgusting and it makes a mess, but he's more interested in actually cleaning things up than figuring out how they got that messy to begin with.
So I guess that's the challenge in front of me right now: where and how do I start cleaning things up? What does it mean to forgive in this situation? How do I guard my steps going forward? How do I get back on track to mature and grow without signing up for the beating all over again?
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