The Internet note 2

The leading Parisian daily Le Monde this week had an interesting article about how web-oriented adolescents are. Web navigation is utterly easy for them and the article concluded that it was part of planetary citizenship to have contact with individuals all over the globe, sometimes over very narrow common interests. The individual is one of many; there are no backwaters, only diversity.

The article also cited the fact that half of all blogs on the web - and there are millions - are the work of adolescents. And went on to wonder if this itself was not a problem because adolescent boys might be slaves to their computers instead of out of the house making friends and meeting girls. I don't know of any facts on this but my guess would be that the web is an avenue for extroversion like any other: those on the make will find a way and the reserved and studious will remain as such. The web can help satisfy one 's curiosity about things and is, to my mind, invaluable in this respect. Adolescents will let go of chatting and all that once the learning involved has been mastered and move on to something else.

What is interesting about all this is the question of who has time for web exploration. One hears of employees who take time from the job - cheat on their employers, as it were,- to pursue web interests. Or how employee groups will sometimes develop a frenzy for a certain on-line game or the like. The web is a magnet and it is 24-hour. And one never knows when something interesting might fly by.

I remember years ago hitting an absolute gold mine by a morning browse through a German-language server welcome page: someone had written a little introduction to the twenty most important philosophers of all time. The set is copyright but I will share what was new to me on the subject: that the English philosopher John Locke (1632-1704) was the first philosopher of stream-of-consciousness, the first to notice the erratic and disjointed character of what goes on in consciousness. It wouldn't have occurred to me to characterize empiricism in this way but it is a very interesting observation, a new cultural take on something I know well.

And isn't this the very essence of a pleasurable encounter: one is on familiar terrain, but one learns something new. Like a good conversation.