Meanwhile, in the Real World...

Something's been bothering me for a while, a low-level, niggling bother that's hard to articulate. It has to do with youth, generally speaking, the Internet, and be-all end-all-ism.

In my experience, if you ask a yowwen what's most important in this or any election campaign, odds are pretty good you'll hear something to do with the Internet, either directly (UBB, throttling, caps, monitoring) or indirectly (digital rights management and copyright reform).

Let me get this right out front: I love the Internet. Like most people half my age, I am completely addicted to  the endless information flow. Possibly because I've never been a social butterfly, I find the need for perpetual connection disquieting: solitude, something I cherish, tends to actually frighten the younger set. (Try confiscating a cell phone and watch the reaction: it's as if you amputated something.)
 But information? When every last question ever you've had about life, the universe and everything can be answered in seconds with a trip through the Google-portal? That be powerful mojo, friend.

But is it really that important?

Perhaps it's creeping senility (I am 39, after all), but I strongly believe in what has charmingly been dubbed "meatspace"--the real world. Anything I see on a screen is suspect, be that screen a television, a tablet, my desktop computer or, especially, my phone. At its best, a screen is tremendously limiting. At its worst, it reflects one's prejudice while distorting everything else.

Facebook is a good example. I'm on Facebook at least three times a day, often more. If tomorrow the Internet were to be suddenly restricted to one suite of sites and I could choose what they were, it'd be a tough call between Reddit and Facebook; I suspect Facebook would win out.
Something is lacking on Facebook, of necessity, though. So-called "social" media is antisocial in the extreme: Canada, with a higher market cap on Facebook than any other country on the planet, has become a nation of people who have willingly entered into solitary confinement, typing by screen-glow.

Call me naive, call me old-fashioned, but Facebook--as much as I enjoy it--is simply no substitute for real face-to-face time.
People's Walls are crafted, usually subconsciously but often very intentionally, to reflect not their true selves, but an idealized version thereof. This is no different, of course, from how many people behave in "real life", but authenticity is much easier to assess off-screen.
Texting, to me, is infinitely worse. You'd think I would welcome a form of communication that relies on the written word, beng as I fancy myself a wordsmith. I don't. I loathe texting almost as much as I loathe cigarettes.  It pithifies human experience into indigestible sound bites: Shakespeare may have called brevity the soul of wit, but he didn't have a BlackBerry. Technology renders brevity soulless.
More alarming, there is some unknown power inherent in text messaging that causes otherwise sane individuals to do things like this:

The number of people I have seen with my own eyes, texting and utterly oblivious to their surroundings, beggars belief. Given that most people obstinately refuse to read words on signs, I can't imagine what it is about words on a two inch screen that so many find captivating.

Anyway, pardon the digression. I said all that to say this: there are important things going on out there in the real world, things that can't be solved by "liking' something on Facebook or "+1-ing" it on Google+. Things that, in point of fact, have nothing to do with the Internet at all.

I know, I know, it's hard to believe there are things that have nothing to do with the Internet, let alone important things.  But trust me, there are.

Take the economy, for instance. It's a shambles, whatever the current narrative out of political capitals might have us believe. And it's likely to get a whole lot worse before it gets better. I say that not out of any doomer inclination (though I have one), but simply because if you listen to those competing narratives, it's quickly apparent that people can't even agree on what caused the problem, let alone what can be done to fix it (if anything). One camp believes that government is the problem, one that it's the solution. One group thinks too much socialism killed the economy, another group is certain that the lack of socialism is the problem. When consensus is impossible, so is concerted action.

Outside of technothrillers like Daniel Suarez' Daemon and Freedom(TM)--which I can only hope somehow translate into reality--it's hard to imagine how our increasing dependence on the Internet will have any effect on the economy whatsoever. I suppose, as the vast majority of us continue to get poorer while a very few get considerably richer, the urge to pay nothing whenever possible will only grow stronger, and so piracy and all its justifications aren't going away any time soon. People will continue to agitate for capless Internet. Nothing anyone has said to me so far has convinced me that you can burn through 250GB in a month legally, but whatever.
As much as I'm against DRM (digital rights management), I don't find it a compelling issue against the backdrop of an economy in ruins. Sure, it'd be nice if you were allowed to use your legally-acquired media in whatever way you please. But is your music or film collection really more important to you than your job? Or the environment we all share, which isn't in much better shape than the economy, last I looked?

If so, your priorities are seriously screwed up, in my view. But you're probably young, and so you'll learn. I hope