Lately lots of people have been talking about Pinterest, another new form of social media and on-line interaction. Pinterest allows participants to explore and develop their interests in different topics — food, home decorating, body art, and the like — by “pinning” news articles, pictures, video, and other items to their “pinboard” for other people to see and comment upon. Family members and friends have used Pinterest to plan weddings and vacations, share their views on books and TV shows, and find special articles of clothing.
My Pinterest friends sound like they become almost obsessed with browsing other people’s “pinboards” and filling up their own with interesting and exciting content that reflects well on them. Similarly, we’ve all got friends who spend a lot of time posting things to Facebook, or blogging (guilty as charged), or playing fantasy sports, or doing the countless other social networking activities you can do on-line. This shouldn’t be surprising; the internet is a constantly changing, interesting environment that puts the whole world at your fingertips and allows for all kinds of communication. All of these nifty on-line interaction websites also can allow you to reconnect with high school and college classmates and faraway friends and keep track of how they are doing. But when does the attraction of the internet pull your home life out of balance, leaving you tapping out a Facebook message or chuckling at a YouTube video while your spouse or girlfriend or children or friends sit idle for hours? How do you strike a workable real life-virtual life balance?
People have always engaged in solitary activities, like reading a book or playing a musical instrument or jogging, but obsession with on-line activities seems to have special risks. Studies suggest that people who spend lots of time on-line often struggle with depression and sleep disorders and tend to neglect their need for physical activity and in-person social interaction. And, of course, the on-line world, with its anonymity and ability to create weird, fake relationships such as the one that has humiliated Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o, involves all kinds of potential personal, financial, and criminal hazards that would never be presented by reading a library book or knitting on the sofa while your spouse watches a basketball game on TV.
We all need to figure out when to step away from the computer.
Currently the internt is “governed” (if you can call it that) by a a collection of non-profit entities. The result has been a lot of freedom and not much regulation. Governments, however, are concerned that they don’t have sufficient control over this massive, still developing communications medium. The U.N. proposal, backed by governments in China, Russia, Brazil, India, and other countries, would give the ITU more authority over cybersecurity, data privacy, technical standards and the Web’s address system.
Why would attorneys need two monitors for their computers? I’m not sure. If you ask them, they give you some song-and-dance about how the extra monitor makes it easier for them to work with spreadsheets, or review documents, or perform some other important function. I’m guessing, however, that their decision to add a monitor was motivated, at least in part, by their belief that it will make their office cooler. And for the most part, it does! Working with that second screen makes them look hip and sharp, like Tom Cruise in Minority Report.
The circle is supposed to reassure you that the system is diligently working on the command you have sent. Instead, it immediately plunges every white collar worker into the blackest pits of despair, because you know that you are likely well and truly screwed. You realize that the spinning circle means you have probably lost what you were working on. And then, after a few seconds, the circle simply serves as a colossal unending annoyance. You can’t help but repeatedly pound the return key with increasing force in hopes of somehow getting the damn circle off the screen before it causes you to become cross-eyed.
As I sit here listening to music, drinking a glass of wine, and tapping away at my keyboard, it’s hard for me to imagine what life would be like without a home computer. For years now, UJ has been faithfully going to the library and using the bank of computers whenever he wants to do research or post to the family blog.
Experts are wondering what the cause of the drop in spam volume might be and are speculating about whether the decline is permanent. They wonder if the big-time spammers have stopped because they’ve been arrested, or if regulations have made spamming too difficult and risky, or if the “botnets” that send a lot of the spam have been disabled somehow, or whether spammers are turning to some new campaign. The reality is, nobody knows.
So it is with the news stories about a 
Of course, it was only a decade or so ago that we were thrilled to have dial-up connections to the internet and to hear that weird boinging sound when the connection was made. Then, when the internet was new and the novelty of so much information at our fingertips had not worn off, we were happy with downloads that took a minute or two. With each new computer and internet service provider, however, the speed of connection and the size of the data stream has improved, and now a wait of more than a few seconds to fly to a new web address is just intolerable.
Coincidentally, this year also is the 40th year of the first Apollo program lunar landing. Although the internet has progressed tremendously during that 40-year period — going from a clumsy method that crashed before even a single word was transmitted to a communications medium that is found in millions of households and allows for instantaneous access to undreamed off amounts of information — the same cannot be said for the space program. Indeed, one could argue that manned space exploration has regressed as far and as quickly as the internet has progressed during that same 40-year span.
