Published April 8, 2007 in the Hibbing Daily Tribune
Every morning, I rise to traverse the world, uncovering all the secrets of the past 12 hours. No, I’m not omnipotent or omniscient, (I’m just omni-me) but I do spend at least an hour every day jetting around the Internet.
I e-mail. I post. I blog. But most of all, I read. I read faster and more diversely than one could randomly picking up and throwing aside the magazines in a public library. I find it to be better than reading magazines, and I’m not alone. One recent Poynter Institute study showed that people who read news online have longer attention spans and are able to absorb more information from articles.
Just 10 years ago, I entered my senior year at a rural Iron Range high school. I had never sent or received an e-mail. I had never even seen the Internet. Today, I teach half of my college instruction load entirely online, often from my home office which connects to the Internet through a communication satellite orbiting Earth. An average day involves 75 e-mail messages and about 2,000 clicks of the mouse, sometimes much more than that. Some days I feel like a caveman who, 10 years after using rocks to tenderize mammoth meat, now manufactures fully functional George Foreman grills. It’s a miracle.
I don’t always use the miracle for the betterment of society. Often, I read about political gossip or seek out pictures of large, unusual animals discovered by men of girth wearing tank tops. At least, that’s what I did yesterday. Did you know that they found a toad the size of a dog in Australia? For young professionals like me, Internet news and so-called viral videos are as important as any other part of the media spectrum. In fact, I would get rid of my television, my newspaper subscription and even my radio before I got rid of my Internet. Why? Because all those things are available on the Internet. One day soon, most of our media will come to us through a high-speed Internet connection.
It’s not that the shaky, unedited clips you see on YouTube or the rambling blog posts of 13-year-olds are going to shake up the world order; it’s that we now have a fairly reliable and inexpensive way to transmit thoughts and ideas to the whole world. I could wax poetic about the political ramifications, but I’ll leave that to the high brows. I want to know how it affects me.
Have you ever googled yourself? Anyone who says they haven’t is either unfamiliar with the term or is just lying, lying, lying. Googling someone means doing a web search on them; googling yourself means you’re seeing what other people see when they google you. My last name is one of the most common English surnames in the world and my first name was rather trendy in the late ‘70s and ‘80s; kind of like how the “Grey’s Anatomy” character names are now. (I pity the Derek and Preston Browns of the future). Thus, today, there are Aaron Browns hiding in all corners of the Internet, on college football teams, correcting code on tech sites, committing felonies in other states and, more often than I care to consider, dying tragically before their time or after a long, courageous battle with a terrible illness.
But it’s all there within my reach, thanks to the Internet. Even if I’m not the only Aaron Brown in the world I am right there in the hunt. I’m a somebody.
Aaron J. Brown is a columnist for the Hibbing Daily Tribune.