PRO INTERNET
Why I Love This Information Mostrosity

Let’s get this straight. The Internet helps make life easier. You all know the catchphrases and taglines. How it’s making the world a “global village”, how it connects us to an endless “stream of information”, how we’re communicating more efficiently. Yeah yeah. Big words, big ideas. But if you’re in media, it’s indispensable.

As a writer and managing editor of a magazine, the Internet is a priceless blessing. Now I can ask contributors with modems to send their articles over the Net. No need for me to encode their pieces after receiving them via fax. (Besides, I am a lousy encoder. My typing has never improved beyond two fingers a hand.) My writer has moved to the States or to Dipolog? Still not a problem over the boundary-ignorant Net. I need something researched? I head over to the computer and start up a search engine. I want to find out how our local (and foreign) competitors in the magazine industry are faring? I head over to their web pages and do a little industrial espionage. I want some information from our readers? I can tell the webmaster for our magazine’s web page to add a questionnaire to his next update. I need the cheat codes to the Mortal Kombat game where my girlfriend beats the crap out of me? It’s all there on the Net.

The Internet is stunning proof of human necessity. After all it did start out as a means for scientists in different U.S. campuses to keep track of the latest developments in their fields. But it is also a marvel of human ingenuity, seeing as how it has evolved or better, mutated, into the gargantuan beast of today. It feeds you information, connects you to the farthest corners of the world, entertains you with the latest gossip, sells you merchandise of any kind, and people still think it’s a tool of the devil because you can download pornographic pictures and texts from its bowels.

Well, let me tell you something. You give man a medium and he will turn it into a vehicle for his basest desires. Give him painting, he will invent nudes; give him print, he will invent Playboy; give him television, he will invent porn flicks; give him the Internet…

You want to know the secret to obliterating access to visual porn online so that your kids never get at it? Use a black and white monitor that only has 16 shades of gray. I guarantee they’ll be so frustrated, they’ll give up. At least until they find a way to get onto the sex chat newsgroups. Hopefully by then, you’ll have educated them enough about morality for them to make their own decisions.

In the end, life without the Internet would be some kind of hell for me. So I’m glad it’s around. And for those who still don’t realize that it already is essential to business and communications, see you in the next century.

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