Life in the 90’s

Back when I was a kid, in my junior high and high school days, we didn’t have the internet. I mean, we weren’t totally primitive because if you wanted to check your bank account balance you could go to the ATM so human interaction was avoidable, but you couldn’t just go to your banks website and know your account balance in 30 seconds. I’m not quite sure how we did research papers, but I know that I never had a teacher warn me not to use Wikipedia as a resource. There were inconveniences of course, but the pace of life was slower and people tended to know each other personally, by voice over the phone for instance, instead of by email or IM.
Iraq is many years behind the times, but I don’t live in Iraq. I live on Rustamiyah, a semi-American outpost that seems to be a cross between living in my childhood Tulsa and living on the moon, with mortars and rockets interspersed with putrid sewer air. I think that should paint a clear picture. One of the innocences I have recovered from my childhood by living here is a self-imposed semi lack of internet. I thought I would go nuts, but it has been about ten days and I’m doing just fine. If you are reading this, you should deduce that I do have some internet access, but it is not the on-demand, high speed, click-on-an-icon-and-be-there internet that Americans have come to take for granted in the years since my youth. I have found that I don’t have to check the Corner on National Review or refresh Drudge every fifteen minutes. In fact, I never had to. I just thought I did because those are the most interesting things on an information super-highway that is really not that interesting.
After slowly devolving from high speed internet in America back to a state of dial-up and then eventually to no internet (on my personal computer at least), I have discovered what the ancients of my parent’s generation once knew: the internet is not life. It is not even a good substitute. Sure, it is boring having to live in reality out here, but if I had, say, a family around I think that having no internet would bring some benefits. Don’t get me wrong. I know that the clock will not turn back, and I wouldn’t really want it to. Al Gore’s net is here to stay. But checking your email only once a day is scandalously liberating.