The concept I have to play around with today is the internet, the world wide web, and as usual my head spins wildly, grappling with the tails and tendrils, up-sides and down-sides of my subject, in this case, the biggest thing in human history.

The internet is the ultimate in the democratization of information(among other things of course, but in this article I will stick with the informational aspect of the beast.) Thanks to Google and the virtually limitless supply of wikis out there, anyone can be informed to varying extents about pretty much anything. At this stage of its the development the internet has become a yawning chasm, assimilating the world’s knowledge and regurgitating it on demand for our collective and individual edification, and, by and large, I think its great.

But not simply great. The role of information in our lives is enormous, and the way we acquire, evaluate and relate it to each other are fundamental considerations in our individual lives, as well as in our collective destiny. Something like the internet, which is irrevocably transforming all aspects of our relationship with information, is not something to be wandered blindly into, as most of the world appears to be doing. Internet is the new television, for many, even the majority of, people an excuse to refuse to do something meaningful with their lives, by engaging a socially acceptable addiction which bears a passing resemblance to reality. Social networking, to use a convenient example, can in some cases be a form of social onanism, people engrossed in relationships with entities as unreal as any soap personality, while taking comfort in the fact that they are not alone. Unlike t.v., one doesn’t even have to wait for tomorrow’s water cooler conversation to be reassured of the normality of one’s behaviour. Electronic heroin would be a nicely melodramatic name for it-but an apt one too, they resemble each other right down to the withdrawal.

Information is everything of which we are conscious. It’s not just the words on this page, or the bytes that make up an mp3, but also the sensation of your fingers on the mouse, the sound of the cooling fan in your ears and the smell of coffee in your nose. The internet supplies us with information from the most basic sensational level, to the highest echelons of our cognition. In terms of the acquisition of the information, the internet has only one advantage-ease of use. The volume of information on the internet found during a ten minute surf pales in comparison to that which we acquire during a ten minute outdoor walk. The internet really specialises in highly developed realms of information-the printed word, music, video. Here it comes into its own. It disseminates these media faster and more efficiently than any other tool. It also allows for their retrieval easier than could be imagined in a pre-Google world. Luddite that I am, I have two problems with this.

First of all it doesn’t allow for the accidental discovery of unexpected information. An internet search is done on specific terms-one doesn’t catch a glimpse of a book with an interesting title, or an article on an exotic subject while whacking the words ‘biodiversified haystacks’ into Google. As we move further from newspapers and libraries into blogs and portals we lose the breadth of knowledge that differentiates a wise person from an informed one. The onus will be on the individual to do this for themselves, and as incidental information becomes harder to find, less people will choose to do so. The kind of knowledge that our fathers and grandfathers had, a holistic wisdom with its emphasis on breadth rather than depth, may well end in this generation. In more practical terms, this will leave experts without the kind of context that gives real meaning to their work-a physicist for example, without any understanding of the philosophy that underpins his method, or a lawyer who fails to understand the sociological impact of his profession. The more powerful the web becomes, the less opportunity there will be for the minor epiphanies that spring from the discovery of a hitherto unknown interest. We will all be poorer for it.

Secondly, activities that were previously restricted to a location where certain documents, records etc were accessible, are now limitlessly mobile. Research can be done in bed, one can work on a tan and on accounts on the same hotel balcony-all that’s needed is a laptop and a wireless modem. We can work anywhere, but does this mean we should work everywhere? From my own limited experience, certain environments are designed for certain activities. I could easily do all my reading for college at home-just pull my materials out of databases instead of from musty shelves-but there is a genius loci (look it up, you’ll be glad you did)in the Trinity library that simply cannot be replicated in my own house(despite, or perhaps because of, the ready supply of tea and cushions.) In Trinity the shape of the building, the muffling of sound by the physical presence of so much knowledge, even the manual searching for each individual volume, all these have contributed to insights I could have found nowhere else. Which I’m sure is precisely what the architect intended…but what kind of buildings would he invent if their uses were as manifold as those of the internet itself? Could such a space be made? Would it even be wise to do so? Our buildings aren’t just a space for our bodies, but also for our minds(a rational explanation for the effect of feng shui) and the dissolution of barriers between where we play, learn and work will have a very definite and unpredictable effect on this.

It’s tempting to allow this article go sprawling away, like its subject, but restraint is always the preferred option in these circumstances. The problems with evaluation and relation of information are interlinked and already well documented-self-diagnosis based on unregulated sources being a prime example. I don’t want to deal with such practicalities. Instead I just wanted to look at some of the questions that spring from the fundamental idea of(to resurrect a defunct phrase) the information superhighway.

The internet is great. I would go as far as to say that without it, the challenges of climate change, energy crises, pandemics, loss of biodiversity and general global insecurity, would prove too great for the human race to overcome. Without such a pooling of our collective knowledge, the end of our species would be an even greater certainty. But it comes with dangers, and to embrace every stage of its development without question, would be a grave error. Already it has become an organic system, its growth, and the growth of its role in human affairs, is inexorably massive. There remains only each individual’s control over their own interactions with it. I would counsel caution, and advise anybody who has had the misfortune to read what I consider a very dry article to its end(seriously, not one flash of biting wit, I must getting soft) that the answer to the real question of our existence is unlikely to be the internet.

PS To paraphrase Sideshow Bob, I am aware of the irony of the internet being my only means of promulgating this article to any meaningful extent.

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It has taken a brief and bitter struggle with myself but, now at one a.m. of a new day I am going to write. I could have left myself in the comfort zone and tomorrow, rested, record today’s events as a coherent and pretty whole. But that would hardly be an accurate picture. No, this must be presented as the shattered, multi-faceted image it is. I’m playing Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in the background, partially in the hopes that the literary spirit of the great HST will give me some semblance of inspiration, partially to heighten the sense of lost sanity I find a day begun at the other side of the country, with an extra hour squeezed in where no one wants and no one expects it to be.

I awoke in Salthill, in Galway city, the Atlantic Ocean barking at me a stones throw from my window…actually that’s just poetic licence, I didn’t really have a window, just the living room floor of a friend’s apartment. Its window wasn’t mine, and it faced in the opposite direction to the sea, onto the back yard of a rather unappealing bar. But the sea was audible and I knew it was there.

The friend I had visited had changed since I last saw him, in that most meaningful of ways, where your tolerance for him has been decimated. One incident is all that’s required to illustrate this.

[Setting: Nighttime, ext. Brendan and Paul sit on a wet rock beside the Corrib river and a canal. Brendan drinks Belgian beer, Paul a bottle of mixed berry cider]
Brendan: Do you know what’s nice? Having someone to love.
Paul: Yeah…Not to sound like a prick, but how often do you think about how you feel about her?
Brendan: Well, not constantly, but every now and then it intrudes into my thoughts like…
Paul:[sharp intake of breath] That’s not a good sign.

I reckon he’d have came up with that, even if I’d said something along the lines of “I ponder my feelings for my girlfriend constantly, and refine my concept of how I feel about her on an hourly basis.” Paul moved from his home and university to be with his girlfriend, but that wasn’t the beginning of his marking out a monopoly on romantic understanding. In all the years I knew him in Dublin he was always locked in some long term relationship or other, which took up most of his time and, all the more irritating, parts of his conversation. And now after two months without seeing him, these comments stung fresh. Their subject was closer to my heart than before, and my recollection of them blunted. He was rarely correct in his statements, but there was always the chance I could be wrong in mine. I haven’t laboured the point. But I think I love my girlfriend, and every now and then something she’s done or said intrudes into my thoughts and I know.

Paul’s brother Kevin had come to Galway with me, and returned with me today. Kev and I are also good friends, and play in a band together. Unlike me however, Kev has taken the jump and immersed himself in music, studying performance and music technology, while I’ve taken the surer path and chosen law. It’s about now that the band is building momentum, and unless something drastic happens our paths will undergo a jagged schism - my band will no longer be mine, and I’ll just be a barrister who plays drums and classical percussion - which I can live with, but all the same, it’s sad. Today was the first time we talked about it, the unhappy details about the point at which I’ll have to take my final leap from the whole flaming vehicle and how we’ll get a replacement to clamber on. Taking a bus across a country is different to taking it across a city - you step out the other side a different person.
When on the first day of college I looked for words of wisdom from my tutor through a beer tinted haze, he said something I thought unlikely.

“You’ll probably find you’ll make new friends at college” he said “And the people you hitherto thought to be your friends were really just people you were hanging around with.” He was right in the first sentence, and about the implied fading away of my old friends, but unfortunately, he was about the ‘just’ part. They were and are the people I love and slowly, slowly they are going away. Our paths our set to split and I shall miss them.

On that note, dear readers, I shall sleep.

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(The Dublin Bus: Bus of the Ford of Hurdles)

Of all the popular myths you know about Ireland, it is unfortunate that the most irritating and banal of them all, is also the most true. It rains. It rains in a way that robs your sight of colour and mind of mirth. It’s raining right now, and so, instead of an enjoyable cycle through the crisp october air, I’m sitting in a bus, blinded by condensation, and wholeheartedly enjoying the anonymity and indifference of my fellow passengers.

Back when Ireland was a gloriously impoverished nation, ie. the 80s (yeah that’s right, while you were discovering gyms and the Walkman, we were emigrating… and then discovering the gym and Walkmans in other countries-perhaps the reasons weren’t purely economic…), before we were wealthy, the bus, like every other place where more than two people congregated, was a social amenity. People -strangers that is- talked on the bus. Being a child of the 90s, and young adult of (may the FSM forgive me for using this word),noughties (seriously WTF is the noughties?-what’s the acronym-00s? can’t we go even a decade without abbreviations?), this seems as distant a concept as hara-kiri. How does it come about? What do strangers have to talk about? Perhaps there were only a few set topics of conversation in less materialistic times- perhaps we’re all just that bit more sophisticated. I mean we have divorce in this country now, and high paid, high commitment, high technology jobs . Surely, this not talking with hitherto unknown people can’t be a retrograde step?

And then immediately to my right, a man starts talking to his friend about law; which is my subject/major in university. He’s a student, which means that he probably goes to the same college as me. We have the same lecturers, the same classes, and both of us think what we’re doing is pretty interesting. But naturally(or unnaturally as the case may be) I’m too scared of making an ass of myself to strike up a conversation, I just keep typing, writing for people I may never see, to make a connection half a world away, a connection that could be just a metre to my right… And now they get off the bus.

I do talk to strangers, but only in situations where it’s acceptable, where it happens all the time, like in college, in societies, at gigs. How in this space of ten or twenty years did the bus become unacceptable ? It’s not like the physical space between us has been increased, quite the opposite, modern buses provide about as much leg room as the glove box of a Mini Cooper, and considerably less air. So why do I not have the wherewithal to turn to whatever individual has been jammed into me in a vaguely intimate and entirely embarrassing way and say “Buses kind of suck, don’t they?” But i have come to my stop, just in time to miss half my first lecture, and my musings end here.

My impromptu verdict: I blame society, because otherwise I would have to blame myself.

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