Dira Sudis ([info]dsudis) wrote,
@ 2008-11-20 15:36:00
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This is not an identity crisis.
So I have today off (because I'm working Saturday--at my job that I found through the internet, after attending a school I chose via the internet partly because of its proximity to friends I knew through the internet, in a profession I chose in part because of the librarians I knew, you guessed it, through the internet)(gimme a second, it'll be relevant). I'm sitting around doing day-off things: refreshing LJ even though everyone else is busy doing regular weekday things, constantly refreshing the blog of an acquaintance to see if he's posted another iPhone update from the hospital where he's undergoing tests, plotting out fic for an exchange I'm way overdue on, plotting out fic for Yuletide, plotting out fic the purpose of which I cannot adequately explain to myself, though I keep trying to explain it to other people through IM and chat. I went out and bought some new shoes, and exchanged text messages with Iulia while I did, about her crazy workday and my rather pleasanter one. Also, I took a nap.

Also, I read this post of John Scalzi's on the AMC website about how real life in the 21st Century is not like a sci-fi movie despite all our crazy science-fictional tech:
Ask yourself: If all your "science fictional" technology were taken away tomorrow, how much would your identity change? If the answer is "not that much," then you're not really living inside a science fiction movie, regardless of how many gadgets you have.


And then I laughed and laughed, and yet felt too ashamed to post a comment saying "Um, I'm pretty sure if the internet evaporated my life would lose eighty percent of its meaning, although on the bright side I would have a lot more time to take naps."

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[info]demotu
2008-11-20 09:49 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, seriously. Not only do I use the internet extensively for school, 90% of my hobbies require it. And then there is my ipod, the fact that the majority of communication with my boyfriend is via cellphone, etc...

Such a liarpants.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 09:52 pm UTC (link)
Well, it's not that I think he doesn't believe it, however sincerely he needs to believe something to make a blog post of it, and I suppose he would say that we are covered under the "people who spend more time in World of Warcraft instead of the real world" except that that's a really unnecessarily narrow definition...

But this is a guy who's made his career in large part via the internet and his blog, so. Color me baffled.

Also, oh my god, I would have died without my ipod during my two and a half years of commuting on public transit. I didn't even think of that. Good Lord.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]demotu, 2008-11-20 09:59 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-20 10:02 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]browngirl, 2008-11-22 12:50 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-22 01:14 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]scalzi, 2008-11-20 10:23 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-20 10:28 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]demotu, 2008-11-20 11:25 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-21 12:58 am UTC

[info]mrsquizzical
2008-11-20 10:06 pm UTC (link)
most of the incidentals i bring up in conversation are either about my kids or about something i read/saw online.

my rl friends know that when i say 'i know this girl' they mean 'i know this girl on the internet'.

*hugs computer*

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 10:21 pm UTC (link)
Oh, man, in high school more or less every conversation I started was prefaced with "there was this dicussion on the List," i.e. the mailing list I was on. Now it's "someone posted on my friends list" or "I was reading this blog."

*hugs computer too*

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]missmollyetc
2008-11-20 10:10 pm UTC (link)
Naps are important, BUT THE INTERNET IS WORTH MORE!

Also, I always knew eventually our lives would be a William Gibson plotline.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 10:23 pm UTC (link)
I don't think there are enough ... guns? Are there guns in William Gibson? Or peril in general?

But, for reals, we all live in a world where it is possible to calculate an exchange rate from Warcraft gold to US dollars and video games have a gross domestic product . It doesn't really matter whether you're in there playing yourself: we live in a pretty goddamn science fictional world.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]missmollyetc, 2008-11-21 02:01 am UTC

[info]selenitia
2008-11-20 10:12 pm UTC (link)
When I finally ran away, I did it by moving several thousand miles away to a city where the only person I knew, I'd met online.

Without the internet and my PS2, I'd be very bored.
And still stuck in Indiana.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 10:25 pm UTC (link)
And God knows, no one should be stuck in Indiana.

That's definitely one of the things I love about my online community and friendships: wherever I go, I'm never too far from someone I know, whether it's somebody who mutual friends assure me is not an ax murderer and with whom I share some hobbies, or somebody I pretty much regard as family. \o/

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]amothea
2008-11-20 10:17 pm UTC (link)
I can't imagine life without the internet, or my ebook reader, or my laptop. almost all my hobbies are computer related. Also cell phones...I really don't get how people survived the 60s and 70s...I listen to my friends talk about photocopying zines and snail mailing them back to original source so someone else can get the snail mailed copy to read and that's how fan fiction sharing worked back then!

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 10:26 pm UTC (link)
I contemplate it occasionally, in a "what to do in the event of internet apocalypse" sort of way, and also a "O, Pioneers!" sort of way, but. Yeah. How did people even SURVIVE?

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]amothea, 2008-11-20 10:57 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-20 11:05 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]amothea, 2008-11-20 11:14 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]renenet, 2008-11-21 12:02 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-21 12:59 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]thewhiteowl, 2008-11-25 08:35 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-25 10:53 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]thewhiteowl, 2008-11-28 12:12 am UTC

[info]flamewarrior
2008-11-20 10:39 pm UTC (link)
:D

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 11:02 pm UTC (link)
\o/

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]niqaeli
2008-11-20 10:57 pm UTC (link)
I would be a hugely different person. The internet and its denizens had a hell of lot to do with shaping who I was as a teenager -- I had someone take me under her wing and get the basics of queer and gender theory into my head when I was 16. And that has been such a huge thing in making me able to intuitively and easily grasp so many concepts that I have observed many others just *don't get*, not without a lot of time and explanation and patience.

That wouldn't have happened without the internet. I was growing up in *rural Tennessee*. My parents were awesome and the area was still pretty strongly Southern Democrat but you know what? I would not have been able to learn queer and gender theory and politics at age 16 without the internet. Maybe if I'd grown up in NYC or something but I didn't. I grew up in rural Tennessee. And I still got that education, and that education shaped me.

So, frankly, we are living in a sci-fi movie. Gen-Y and the Millenials are digitally native and it's shaping us in ways that the older generations, even a lot of Gen-X, simply can't grasp yet because they *aren't* native.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 11:04 pm UTC (link)
Yeah, agreed--just swap in a small town in Michigan and a generally progressive worldview. I am fond of saying that I grew up on the mailing list I subscribed to from the age of 15 to 20, and I really really cannot imagine who I would have grown up into without it.

You make a good point about the generational issue, too; I think I'm on the older edge of the Millennial cohort, and I'm not used to perceiving a generation gap between me and people who are not, in actual years, so very much older.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]niqaeli, 2008-11-20 11:19 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-21 01:02 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]niqaeli, 2008-11-21 02:31 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]thewhiteowl, 2008-11-25 08:56 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]tricksterquinn, 2008-11-21 12:30 am UTC

[info]reginagiraffe
2008-11-20 11:06 pm UTC (link)
Yes. This.

I mean, my experiences aren't precisely (and by 'precisely' I mean 'anything at all' *g*) like your experiences, but the gist is the same.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]niqaeli, 2008-11-20 11:21 pm UTC

[info]knotted_rose
2008-11-20 11:04 pm UTC (link)
I telecommute for my day job. If you took that away, I think you'd change an essential part of me. If I had to go into an office every day again I'd be miserable and anti-social. Because I get to spend huge amounts of time alone, I can afford to be social in the evenings and on weekends.

Without the internet I would never have discovered fandom, or slash, for that matter, and I think that, too, would have changed my personality in essential ways.

I also wouldn't have found my naturopath, who saved my life in so many ways. So, yeah, I think that I am living in a sci-fi world in some ways, because if you took away my technology, the way I make a living, my health and my fandoms, you would have changed my identity -- happy, healthy telecommuting slasher to unwell, miserably unhappy office worker with no social life.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-20 11:06 pm UTC (link)
See? Not only are we living in the future, we are living an AWESOME future!

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]adina_atl
2008-11-20 11:10 pm UTC (link)
Let's see.

I work for a software company as a programmer. The software company is in Atlanta, Georgia; I'm in Dayton, Ohio; we work with developers in India; another coworker moved to the Ukraine six months ago. We all communicate "face to face" through video conferencing and Skype. Our clients are in five different states, none of which are the two states where the company has employees. The servers for our clients are in yet another state, and I'm not even sure which one. My computer connects to the servers, whatever state they happen to be in, as if they're in my living room.

Ninety percent of my social life is on-line, the rest is facilitated by email. Nothing special there, not among my social circle.

My brother, who lives in England, talks almost daily with my father in Georgia via Skype, since they run a book publishing company together, most of the sale of which are done online. My mother video conferences with her grandchildren in England over the internet, since she only sees them in person once a year (and if you don't think that trans-Atlantic flights within the price-range of a middle-class retired person is science fiction, you have no memory and no knowledge of history). I do programming work for my brother's company, for which he pays me in pounds--except that the money is automatically deposited in my U.S. bank account in dollars.

Meanwhile, the last time I was in England I got hooked on Fortnum and Mason's rose pouchong tea, so when the tin I brought back ran out I ordered more from their website. I also buy specialty silk and dyes online from a company in California, which I found, naturally, by asking on my church's mailing list. I will most likely order my niece and nephew's Christmas presents from a UK website--Nintendo DS games, naturally. (Incidentally, if you don't think that flying across the Atlantic with a nine-year-old and a four-year-old plus two Nintendo DSs is different from flying with the children but without the DSs, I invite you to try it yourself.)

Edited to remove typoes.

Edited at 2008-11-20 11:22 pm UTC

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[info]adina_atl
2008-11-20 11:44 pm UTC (link)
You know, like Scalzi I forgot about the most life-changing piece of technology in my life, one that's so close to me that I literally cannot see it. Every morning I insert a small object, made out of a mysterious substance that appears to be mostly solidified water, into each eye. As a result, I can SEE! Without these objects I'm legally blind, could not drive a car, cannot clearly see my own feet, and can barely read. With them I have perfect vision.

It's not as modern a technology as iPods, but it's life-changing for me. The invention of "mostly water" soft lenses came about the same time as my vision deteriorated to the point that glasses weren't fully correcting it.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-21 01:04 am UTC (link)
Oh, man, contacts. I guess I could wear glasses, but I suspect I would mostly just spend a lot of time having headaches (for the opposite reason--my prescription is stupidly slight, just enough to cause me eyestrain).

And for everything else--yeah. We live lives our grandparents could not have fathomed (and mostly still don't understand), which is a good enough definition of 'my life is science fiction' for me.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]adina_atl, 2008-11-21 02:14 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-21 03:36 am UTC

[info]tricksterquinn
2008-11-21 12:37 am UTC (link)
Wow. He's kind of... wrong. I mean, without the internet, I couldn't keep in touch with ANYONE - not only friends and family but work contacts. I couldn't find a place to dry-clean my clothes. I wouldn't even be able to jobsearch like I currently am - which means not only would I have to pick up information and listings once a week but I simply wouldn't have ACCESS to many.

Without a cell phone, I couldn't actually keep in touch with ANYONE. I have moved cross-country 5 (or 7, depending how you count) times in the past YEAR AND A HALF. There is literally no way outside of my cell phone and the internet that I can be reached reliably. And THAT, honestly, is something that would change my identity if it were removed.

Which may sound dumb, but it would. Not just my life, not just functionality, but fundamental things about my identity.

Which has NOTHING to do with World of Warcraft.

Honestly, the piece you just quoted there? Just make me think the speaker is old, and amazingly out of touch with what life is like for an entire generation.

(note: I checked his age before posting this but after saying that - have no idea who he is and don't care enough to read the whole blog post in question)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-21 01:21 am UTC (link)
Well, he's not old old, but I think he is older enough than we are to have a totally different perspective on technology and the internet. They're things he uses; they're a big part of who we are.

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]tricksterquinn, 2008-11-21 01:55 am UTC

[info]ceares
2008-11-21 12:50 am UTC (link)
Hmm, I'd have to say it's definitely a generational thing though because as much as I adore the internet and all the wonderful things that come along with it, Hurricane Ike which had us out of power for at least a week pretty much showed me that I'm fine without it. Don't get me wrong, I'd miss it terribly, and it has broadened me, shaped some ideas, instituted changes faster than they probably would have come, sure, but the core of me? I'd still be me. As a person of a certain age, ahem the internet has only really been a force in my life for the past 15 yrs or less.

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[info]dsudis
2008-11-21 01:22 am UTC (link)
About twelve years, for me, but yeah. They've been a pretty significant twelve years. :)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]splash_the_cat, 2008-11-21 02:15 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-21 02:18 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]ellen_fremedon, 2008-11-21 06:02 pm UTC
(no subject) - [info]adina_atl, 2008-11-21 01:55 am UTC
(no subject) - [info]ceares, 2008-11-21 05:17 pm UTC

[info]grey_bard
2008-11-21 08:55 am UTC (link)
Ahahahah.

No offense, Scalzi, man, but.

Way to show you're old.

I mean, yes, he's totally an internet pioneer, but I believe him when he says his life wouldn't be much different without the internet. It probably wouldn't be. He'd still be a published sci fi author - although maybe it would have taken him a little longer - and he could probably publish most of what would be his best blog work in the local paper or something. His life might very well be the same.

Ours wouldn't. *Mine* wouldn't. I'm right there with you. *So* right there with you. Not because I'm an early adopter or have obvious gadgets out the wazoo (I don't), but because the tech that is in my life has changed the way and the course of my life so very much.

My job, my current ambitions, my closest friend, my subculture and favorite amusement, my creative outlet - I wouldn't have them without the internet. I have no *idea* how I would have grown into myself, who I would have grown into without it, because I'm gay and I'm a writer, and all of my role models for both of those things were here in the subculture I found and joined online. I'd still have many of the same traits, I'm sure, but I can't even imagine how I'd live them, who I would be.

I work at a job that mainly produces content for the internet, which I found through connections I had on the internet, in an industry (comics) that I partly fell in love with through the internet. Meanwhile, I'm able to spend about an hour a day with my closest friend, despite the fact that she lives hundreds of miles away thanks to online chat programs. Oh, and did I mention that I don't even want to *think* about what it would have been like figuring out I was gay as a teenager

When it came to the choice between cable tv and a broadband connection, I didn't hesitate for a moment to start shopping for a tv antenna on Amazon.com.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]grey_bard
2008-11-21 08:58 am UTC (link)
Note: For clarification: my closest friend is not the internet itself . She is someone I met and keep in touch with through the internet, in between rare visits.

(Reply to this) (Parent)
(no subject) - [info]dsudis, 2008-11-21 02:24 pm UTC

[info]melissima
2008-11-22 12:56 am UTC (link)
With no desire to be argumentative, just exploring here...

I think it's partly an age-generational difference, but it's also a personality thing.

I mean people who have no shyness or reticence in the real world that the anonymity of the internet eases, and no physical difficulties from which the internet or other technology can "cure" them (contacts, hearing aids, my awesome adapted van and power wheelchair, prosthetics, etc etc.) might very well see technology as something they "use" instead of something they "need."

Scalzi's one year older than me, and he apparently doesn't think he needs his tech. But I need technology, and I embrace it even more than my 20-year-old daughter does. :) (She's still native, though. She can do tech support for her grandmother while watching cartoons. :mind boggles:)

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-22 12:59 am UTC (link)
Yeah, over in his post, I got as far as the part where he told someone that "without technology I would be dead" did not mean that technology made them a fundamentally different person than they would have been without it, and I had to give up on his argument entirely.

But certaintly, yes, there are people for whom it matters more and people for whom it matters less, and while age and class and gender and sexuality and (dis)ability all feed into it to some extent, some of it still comes down to individual idiosyncrasy.

(Reply to this) (Parent)

[info]thewhiteowl
2008-11-25 08:32 pm UTC (link)
(Dropping in via friendsfriends)

Hah. I'm a software engineer. My employers are on the other side of the Atlantic. I can wander into work at 9:30, log on to a server 3000 miles away, FTP data onto it and have it all ready and running before the business need to use it at 7am EST. And then I can have lunch. And I talk to people five time zones away more often than I do the people down the street where I used to work.

I don't even know what I'd do, if I weren't working in IT. I know we're supposed to have a backup plan for if we get outsourced to India, but I've been hacking about with computers so long, it really is part of my identity.

Let's not even get on to my social life. The majority of the people I know are online.

(Reply to this) (Thread)

[info]dsudis
2008-11-25 10:55 pm UTC (link)
Welcome! And. Yes. There you have it. :)

(I remember, particularly, when contemplating moving a thousand miles for my first grownup professional job, realizing how many of my friendships would be totally unaltered as long as I still had broadband internet. *g*)

(Reply to this) (Parent)(Thread)
(no subject) - [info]thewhiteowl, 2008-11-28 12:14 am UTC

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