Into the woods, wired to wireless

Originally published 24 October 2000

I’m wired. Or I should say, I’m wired wireless.

For my birth­day, my wife and son gave me an Apple Air­Port—high-speed wire­less tech­nol­o­gy that con­nects my Mac lap­top to the Inter­net from any­where in the house or yard. I can read Sci­ence and Nature from the back­yard deck. I can check out cross­word clues while reclin­ing on the couch. I can lis­ten to Irish radio sta­tions on stream­ing audio while read­ing in bed.

The whole thing is net­worked, along with my wife’s desk­top iMac, to the print­er and cable modem. TCP/IP. Sub­net Mask. Direct Sequence Spread Spec­trum. Eth­er­net Hub. I could nev­er have fig­ured out how to do it myself. With­out my son’s tech­ni­cal exper­tise, I’d have been dead in the water.

It’s a hot lit­tle sys­tem, and I must say that I’m enjoy­ing it.

It’s hard to believe that only 10 years ago the Inter­net was the exclu­sive prop­er­ty of sci­en­tists, aca­d­e­mics, and a few high-school com­put­er nerds.

Then sud­den­ly the Inter­net surged into the pub­lic domain. For a while there was talk of the whole thing crash­ing — more traf­fic than the sys­tem could bear. But some­how — mys­te­ri­ous­ly for most of us — the elec­tron­ic infra­struc­ture appeared. I don’t under­stand ful­ly how the Inter­net works — either phys­i­cal­ly or eco­nom­i­cal­ly — and I don’t know any­one who does ful­ly under­stand how it works. But here I am in the year 2000 sit­ting at the kitchen table wire­less­ly order­ing books from Ama­zon and air­plane tick­ets from Travelocity.

I can read reviews of books I want to buy. I have as much flight info at my fin­ger­tips as my trav­el agent. When I went to buy a new car recent­ly, I had read a dozen inde­pen­dent reports on its qual­i­ty and safe­ty, and I knew exact­ly the min­i­mum I would have to pay. I prob­a­bly know as much about my med­ical prob­lems as my doc­tor (although I defer to his expe­ri­ence). I know exact­ly where along its route is the pack­age I sent by FedEx. I can check my col­lege library cat­a­log from home, and read almost any mag­a­zine or news­pa­per. And lit­er­al­ly, if I want­ed to pur­sue it, I have access to the pri­vate lives and enthu­si­asms of mil­lions of peo­ple worldwide.

In short, I have avail­able more infor­ma­tion than I could assim­i­late in a life­time. The Inter­net is a vast, sprawl­ing uni­verse of infor­ma­tion both use­ful and friv­o­lous, author­i­ta­tive and fool­ish, ele­vat­ing and degrad­ing. The prob­lem is no longer that the Inter­net might crash from over­load; the prob­lem is that we might crash.

We are in dan­ger of infoparalysis.

Make no mis­take: The Inter­net is a boon to me per­son­al­ly and prob­a­bly a boon to humankind. It means I can research and write from any­where in the world (I’m as plugged in on a trop­ic island as if I were in the Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty Library). And the bor­der­less, uncen­sored anar­chy of the Inter­net is cer­tain­ly bad news for total­i­tar­i­an regimes and pur­vey­ors of parochial prejudice.

The Inter­net lib­er­ates the indi­vid­ual from those priv­i­leged few who pre­vi­ous­ly held the keys to infor­ma­tion — dic­ta­tors, priests and mul­lahs, doc­tors, lawyers, trav­el agents, car deal­ers, estab­lish­ment sci­en­tists — and that’s excit­ing. It also sets the indi­vid­ual adrift on an ocean of infor­ma­tion with­out com­pass or map, and that’s scary.

The rush to con­nect kids to the Inter­net in schools is exact­ly the wrong approach, at least in the devel­oped coun­tries. School should be the place to acquire the com­pass and the map — a moral com­pass and an intel­lec­tu­al map. It should be the place to learn that infor­ma­tion is amoral; it’s what we do with infor­ma­tion that will either enrich or impov­er­ish our lives and the lives of oth­ers. And it’s the place to learn that not all infor­ma­tion is equal­ly reli­able — that a peek though a tele­scope or micro­scope at the real world can be a more trust­wor­thy trip to truth than a week on the Web.

I would rather see a class­room with globes and maps and grow­ing plants and art and books and music and a com­pas­sion­ate, knowl­edge­able teacher than all the tech­nol­o­gy in the world. Let the kids learn who they are and where they have come from, then go surf­ing on their own time. They will bring more to the Web and take more from it.

My new wire­less con­nec­tion to the Inter­net is cer­tain­ly con­ve­nient and fun. It con­nects me more flu­id­ly and effort­less­ly to the Inter­net than ever before. But I know that these new tech­nolo­gies make it all the more impor­tant that I take myself with increas­ing fre­quen­cy beyond the range of the Air­Port’s seduc­tive sig­nal — into the woods, mead­ows, libraries, cafes. I know it means spend­ing more time in con­ver­sa­tion with real human beings, fam­i­ly and friends. And most of all, I know it means time alone, in silence and soli­tude, think­ing about who I am, what I want to know, and why I want to know it.