Tag Archives: internet

The Mysteries of Modern Technology

One day in the 1990s a free AOL disc arrived in the mail.  I did not have the faintest idea what it was.  I did not understand what “online” and “world wide web” meant, either.

Several friends urged me to try it. And suddenly I was part of the AOL community. Lo and behold! bibliophiles wrote about trying to persuade bookstore clerks to sell them the latest Diana Gabaldon before the publication date. On another occasion, an online friend agonized over whether to buy a limited illustrated edition of David Copperfield.  

I felt more “connected” online, as I literally was. And years later I discovered book blogs, Dickens discussion groups, the Goodreads Challenge, Netgalley, and many bookish sites. 

David Copperfield and the Micawbers

But not everything is jolly online.  There are the dicey dating apps.  Friends and acquaintances have reported disappointment. There seems to be a loneliness industry online.  The app basically arranges a blind date with a stranger, only none of your friends know him or her or can vouch for him or her.

 Pop culture has normalized dating apps. (I am married, so it doesn’t concern me.) But on TV sitcoms gorgeous actors and actresses sit on barstools (never in booths) and scroll through dating site responses until they find an attractive man.  (No nerds need apply.) So then they meet at the bar and have quick sex in the grimy restroom.  Or if they take the stranger home, they kick him or her out before dawn.  It’s very cold. Does life influence sitcoms, or do sitcoms influence life?  And being practical, I wonder about the incidence of STDs. Does anyone catch gonorrhea?

In real life, the results of the dating apps are less benign than advertised.  According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study,  many women report being sexually harassed at the dating sites.  The study says, “57% of women between age 18 and 34 said they’d received sexually explicit messages or images they hadn’t asked for at the dating app sites.”  

And a study at NIH (the National Institute of Health) reports that dating apps can cause depression and anxiety..

The majority of the population are reliant on dating apps to meet prospective partner, and such apps are having an impact on their mental health; these factors may very well make this into a public health concern. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Household Pulse Survey estimates that depression and anxiety are now affecting 34.2% of the population, making them the two most common mental health disorders in the United States, and to some extent, the increased numbers have been associated with dating app use.

Of course I wonder about the validity of these studies. Does “the majority of the population” actually rely on dating apps?  What does that meant?

But let’s hope that there is still the possibility of a “meet cute.” We all want to be Meg Ryan in You’ve Got Mail.  (In fact, I think I will watch it tomorrow.) I also recommend the poet and editor Jill Bialosky’s brilliant book, Poetry Will Save Your Life. In one chapter, she writes about the difficulties of meeting men in New York when she was in her late twenties.  And then she attended her high school reunion and met her dream man, an old friend.  They fell in love and married, and presumably lived happily ever after.

Meanwhile, don’t expect too much of the internet. I recommend that you turn to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.  Mr. Collins may be wrong for Elizabeth Bennet, but he is an okay match for her friend Charlotte, who wants to leave home and have her own house. Charlotte is in her late 20s and her expiration date is near. Fortunately, women no longer have an expiration date.

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Are There Too Many People on the Internet?

Online photo of a Zoom meeting of a book group.

Sometimes it’s too much.  Do you ever feel that way?  . 

You look up a book at Goodreads or LibraryThing, and realize that thousands of people are reading it, thousands have already read it, and thousands more want to read it.

If so many readers are reading it at the same time, does that mean that individuals are interchangeable?  And are we still sharing our love of books, or creating a database that enables AI and marketers to “read” readers?  (No, we’re fighting the good fight: individuals matter.)

And I am a fan of consumer reviews, whether at blogs, vlogs, or book forums. And I prefer outspoken reviewers to shills, though I am trying to tone down my candor a bit here.

It is the authors themselves who are nervous about book sites. They complain about hatchet jobs, and I cannot blame them. Yet I have found brilliant reviews of Doris Lessing’s experimental novel The Four-Gated City, and Lawrence Durrell’s lush, lyrical, strange tetraology, The Alexandria Quartet, at book sites.  It makes you happy to be on the internet after all.

So, yes, these are my people.  On a simple level, that might or not be true. 

Because so many of my favorite blogs have disappeared. Did anyone find out what happened to Dovegreyreader?  And a longtime friend deleted her blog after moving into an ALF. I begged her to keep it, but she said it was “just a lot of old opinions about books.”  I often thought of her when I blogged that year and was puzzled that she no longer commented. And then I found her obituary.

I miss the writer Robert Hellenga, who kindly agreed to a Q&A interview. He sometimes commented at my blog. But he died in 2020, the year his last novel, Love, Death & Rare Books, was published. He was an excellent novelist and a kind person.

I’m not writing for anyone in particular any more.  I stay in my corner of the blogosphere and write for myself,

There are millions of people on the internet. Did Charlton Heston say, “I am a human being!”? (Planet of the Apes?) “Soylent Green is people!” he definitely said in Soylent Green, a movie about overpopulation. (Soylent Green was very loosely based on Harry Harrison’s novel, Make Room! Make Room!, which I wrote about here.)

Charlton Heston in “Soylent Green”

N.B.  The Numbers:  According to Pew Research,  96% of Americans use the internet.  And the U.S. Census Bureau says there are approximately 340,110,988 Americans. 

Rumors of Loneliness:  True or False?

What filter?

The concept of loneliness on the internet is widely accepted.  Loneliness, period,  is clickbait.  Editors and writers are susceptible to studies on  loneliness.  Editor to reporter:  “Write a piece on loneliness on the internet. Check out the University of Blah study.  Good stuff!”

We all want to be happy, we all want loads of friends, we all socialize with our dysfunctional families, and everyone is terrified of solitude except Thoreau.

Yet when I read these articles on loneliness I am incredulous. The studies conclude that people are anxious and lonely because they don’t get enough likes, because their lives are less exciting than their rivals’ on Facebook, and they don’t look charming enough in filtered selfies.

IIn short, we are a nation in crisis. The lonely ones are so depressed by the lack of likes on social media or by not resembling Taylor Swift or Nicole Kidman that they will end up in the looney bin for as long as their insurance will cover it.  There they will be expected  to sand and paint ceramic animals in crafts (a cheap form of art therapy).

You know what I say:  Turn off your like button!  Turn off your filters!  Get off YouTube immediately!  Don’t even try to look like Taylor Swift!

The odd thing is that the writers of the articles on loneliness never indicate the affirmation of the act of writing, which is surely part of the motivation to post.  Of course we write alone, but it doesn’t feel lonely: it is an affirmation of our flights of fancy, a stimulation or simulation of happiness. It forms an intuitive connection between our hands, our keyboards and our  flow of words. 

And the studies may be biased. How is the control group chosen? We don’t know. An acquaintance once participated in a study by a famous sociologist.  She claims that she  and her friends mischievously lied  to the researchers,  because the questions were so absurd, so obviously based on the assumption that women are wispy and delicate.  The resulting book based on the study was considered profound.  

All I can say is everyone loves clickbait.

Who’s in Trouble on the Internet?

On an “electronics-free” vacation—and I find it sad that I use a phrase like “electronics-free”— life was calmer. I found myself staring happily at a plane tree.  I also read poetry.  

Why don’t I do this all the time?

On my return, I decided not to bother with the internet.  But soon I was checking my email.  And then I read the news.  And then I learned about the latest celebrity scandal.

Now by celebrity scandal, I do not mean scandal.  It is usually something quite ordinary.  For a couple of years, it was the angst of delicate adult women who were apparently raised in caves, or they would not have been traumatized when a famous man touched their butt in a bar (possibly 50 years ago).  More scandalously, Roseanne Barr was fired from her own TV show for making an offensive joke about a black woman.   I am sure it was offensive, but I note that her career depends on offensive jokes about everybody.  And then there was the Marie Kondo scandal: when the famous declutterer suggested that her clients should weed some of their books, people on Twitter went crazy.

And now there’s the Jonathan Franzen scandal.  In an essay in The New Yorker, “What If We Stopped Pretending?”,  he said that climate change cannot be reversed and is causing an apocalypse.  He writes,

If you care about the planet, and about the people and animals who live on it, there are two ways to think about this. You can keep on hoping that catastrophe is preventable, and feel ever more frustrated or enraged by the world’s inaction. Or you can accept that disaster is coming, and begin to rethink what it means to have hope.

And people are furious at his belief in the climate change apocalypse.

I rarely agree with Jonathan Franzen, but what he says has been said before.  Surely nobody is shocked at this point at the idea of an apocalypse. And he is not the first person to mention that Earth is going, going, gone.  Barbara Kingsolver said in an interview that she believed she was seeing the end of the world.    And nobody, to my knowledge, got angry at Kingsolver–everybody likes Kingsolver.

Franzen also attacks the Democrats’ Green New Deal and claims green energy will not make a difference.  He is wrong.  It can make an enormous difference — it can slow down the apocalypse, if not prevent it.  

And though it is hard to trust any politicians, they may follow through, because even the corporations want green energy now.  It is cheaper than fossil fuel. 

Things couldn’t be worse, but Franzen isn’t to blame.

Hope for the best, expect the worst.