I’ve long enjoyed my love affair with the Internet. It’s my home away from home, my smaller yet infinitely vast home inside of my larger yet physically limited home. In that way plus countless others, the Internet is just one tiny, big paradox.
For instance, the Internet expedites the homework-doing process by providing immediate access to all resources. However, that immediate access to everything is what keeps me from even setting the homework-doing process into motion.
With all of the information out there, who can really be concerned with homework or the writing of ridiculous opinion articles? I’m too busy with Facebook, clicking back and forth between my profile and the home page, waiting for something to happen.
The other day, after an hour of nothing happening, something finally did happen. Thank gods, another reason to remain motionless in a chair in my room, on the Internet.
My archrival Jed Pressgrove, former Reflector opinion editor, sent me an instant message on the nifty chat program, and I’ll never forget what it was that he said to me that day. Actually, I don’t remember exactly, but it was something to the effect of, “I trust that you’re preparing a post-election article now.”
I pretended that I hadn’t just been loitering on Facebook for over an hour, and I indulged him by saying that I would get on it. And that’s where I’m at right now – on it.
I tell you all of this background information in order to provide an appropriate backdrop for the realization that occurred to me on that day. As I sat on that social networking site, with access to everyone and everything, I was soon stricken by the implications of such a lifestyle.
For the last five years or so, the extremes of my life have been chronicled on Facebook. There are photos of me sprinting all-out at the end of cross country races, and there are ridiculous photos of me wearing pink wigs at Halloween parties. This is not to mention all of the unflattering pictures that I’ve untagged over the years. There is one where someone is spewing milk directly at my face that I find particularly regrettable.
Barack Obama and John McCain probably spent a lot of time over the last several months worrying about and/or covering up their most unflattering vestiges of the past. And although a few worrisome items are always unearthed during political campaigns, nothing awful enough to ruin either of those two happened to pop up.
However, consider what the campaign process is going to be like for our generation 30 years down the road when we are the ones running for president. The Internet will serve as one big scrapbook of all the most awful things we’ve ever done.
How are we going to elect a president that is identifiable in hundreds of pictures seemingly taken at Rick’s Cafe over the span of seven years? And how can we elect a president that obviously spent more time perfecting the physics behind his angle of bounce in beer pong than actually studying physics?
Or as Matt Watson, the current Reflector opinion editor, pointed out to me, what if we’re not talking about the president? What if we’re talking about the Pope? Is the Pope allowed to have played flip-cup at any point in his life?
You might be saying those folks shouldn’t be the ones getting elected anyway. The only problem is that those folks have and always will be the ones getting elected. Before now, however, we just couldn’t prove those folks’ pasts weren’t as pristine as we had imagined, or hoped.
That’s another paradox of the Internet. Such a proliferation of knowledge can bring us all a lot closer to the truth, if we so choose. However, how much are any of us really comfortable with knowing or finding out, online or off? I can attest to the fact that ignorance is bliss, but I have to say that ignorance isn’t quite as easy as it used to be.
Robert Scribner is a graduate student majoring in business administration. He can be contacted at [email protected].