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Friday freewrite
...spanning the Pacific
 Late last night, I was engaged in three concurrent online conversations with relatives: my cousin Aaron in San Francisco, my nephew JJ in Hawaii, and my cousin Maria Fe in the Philippines. While it's now commonplace to think about the Internet as having made the notion of distance obsolete, I've never felt the reality as keenly as I did last night. What we talked about ranged as far afield as the use and efficacy of particular dictionaries, to ollies over two and a half skateboards set on top of each other, to the vicissitudes and moments of grace of one's ancient, beloved grandmother.
At the midpoint of the 20th century, the cultural philosopher Marshall McLuhan spoke of our planet and our human civilization as becoming a global village. His most famous statement was that the medium is the message. Here, finding outselves at the cusp of the new century and millennium, with the advances in computer science and information technology that have supercharged the last decade, we're totally living out McLuhan's dictum. This medium that we find ourselves in, this thing we call "cyberspace," is in fact the message: the very fact of the Internet has made a mockery of time and distance, and makes us see ourselves and the interweaving of our relationships in a vastly different way from how we did, just a mere half-generation ago.
...for example
Allow me to get a little personal about the notion of this 'message,' and let me talk about a particular relationship I have with one of you, a relationship that is mediated in a significant way by the medium of the Net itself.
Anyone who followed the little fracas Jon Berney (a.k.a. Sparky) and I had over the past few days, via our weblogs, regarding the Manila weblog server's sudden inclusion of a buggy new feature, knows that I reacted strongly (and yes, quite disapprovingly) to his angry flamefest of a denunciation against some faceless Manila programmer. When I counseled civility, his reaction was even more profanity. This stopped me in my tracks, as if I was hit by a two-by-four, and made me seriously question my role as his mentor: if I wasn't making a difference here, if what he perceived as my values weren't worth adhering to, then clearly I was wasting my time.
And for me, time has now become an issue in and of itself. Using the Internet as a medium for my mentoring work has made it feel like time has sped up and yet, paradoxically, also made me feel like there's even less of it than before. On the face of it, if time has sped up for you, you'd think you would have more of it. It's like time being a vehicle... the faster it goes, the more ground, the more space you should be able to cover. But it's paradoxical because in fact, it feels like there's less "space" I can cover. (And there's more to this feeling than its just being a function of me growing older or "slowing down" ::chuckle::)
See, it's like this for me: over the last six years or so, using the Internet as a mentoring tool, I've been able to gather a remarkable community of students and/or mentees around me. (Which was a departure from how I used to mentor before 1994, but that's another story for another time.) It's a large and diverse group of kids (some of whom are grown up now) that I've been privileged to know, and who gave me the priceless opportunity of walking alongside them, on their journey from adolescence to adulthood. And most definitely, the Internet has been an important glue in the bonding process.
The Net has, in fact, been the decisive tool that has enabled me to be an adult guide, a mentor, a listener and yes, just a friend, to these kids. In addition, my current nomadic existence precludes my being a mentor in the traditional sense of someone who is physically around to hang out with. As such, the Net has been my lifeline in this endeavor, this life choice.
...getting to the heart of the matter
 Over time, over the last five summers that i've continued teaching The Internet Classroom at ATDP, this cohort of young people has grown larger. Even exponentially so. And, since I have infinite resources neither of time nor energy, nor a personal well of limitless patience, I've had to figure out strategies to work it out for myself so that I can remain a positive presence in the life of any given kid in my circle at any given time. One strategy that i've been employing lately is conscription: I've been looking around at various adult friends of mine and asking them if they've got the time, the willingness, and the commitment to devote part of their lives as mentors to young people. And I'm happy to report that, so far, this effort has had wonderful results: it is, in fact possible for my work within this large circle of kids to occur in a distributed fashion, in which I'm not the only adult involved.
It has been plain as day for me that, over the years, I haven't met too many adults who are keen on the idea of being some kid's mentor or friend. As I like to say, if every single (i.e. non-parent) adult were to seriously care for and mentor just one kid, we would have far fewer problems as communities, as societies, as a civilization. And bear in mind here that what I'm talking about is not parenting.
Anyway, as far as that recent confrontation with Sparky went, I'm glad to say that, with reasonable and heartfelt talking, we resolved our differences. It was important for both of us to know that, even if there are some things we do that annoy and drive us up our separate walls, in the end genuine caring and communication fixes the breaks and cracks, love and compassion conquers all. The moral of the story is starkly simple: keeping the lines of communication open is crucial.
And so we circle right back to the main idea in today's weblog, of the Internet and this medium as being the modern means of communication between farflung individuals... as the tool which can make our globe feel like one large village. The reality is certainly far from the ideal, of course. The gap between the wired and the un-wired is still persistent but I, for one, don't believe that it's an intractable (insoluble) problem. If someone from a small village in the Philippines can, with the most basic instruments, get online and talk to me and to her relatives in America, then there is hope that the digital divide can be bridged.
But there are other, more fundamental divides: indeed, it can on occasion feel like there's a seemingly infinite distance between just Berkeley and Castro Valley, two towns on the same side of a bay in the west coast of a continent in the northern hemisphere of the planet. Bridging such a gap requires much more than just the tool of the cyber-medium. The best 'tool' to continue using is the one not comprised of bits and bytes, nor of digital information; it's one of the oldest ones: it is, quite simply, the human heart.
recommended cool weblog readings for today...
oh hey... i just noticed this: http://www.userland.com/mostReadSites we're still in the Top 100 most read weblogs! #75 haha.
and, while weblogging is NOT a popularity contest, here nevertheless is a well-argued piece about Why Popularity Matters.
and two very well-written pieces on weblogging -- one by a journalist at The Guardian (a British newspaper), and one by a weblogger:
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{ net.casting }
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