The Ties That Bind

Today is the 25^th anniversary of the World Wide Web, and it actually has someone credited with inventing it: Sir Tim Bemers-Lee, who is also credited with creating the first software to browse it with. I swear, I thought the Web was older than that (and I know there’s a difference of some kind between the WWW and the Internet, but don’t ask me to explain it). And where exactly does Al Gore fit in?

I had always been of the opinion, perhaps since childhood, that human beings have this irresistible drive to be connected, and that wireless communication made life dramatically easier. Via amateur radio, I was able to talk to folks all over the world, but there were so many low-level practical uses. Example: two hams could agree to meet for coffee. If one were late, he could let the other know by radio; if he got lost, the other could “talk him in.” Decades before cell phones.

For journalists, Web connectedness is, of course, indispensable. It wasn’t all that long ago that when there was an earthquake in Southern California, where I lived, I had the devil of a time getting a magnitude and location on it. I had to rush to the newsroom and call Cal Tech and hope there was somebody there who could read the meters and talk to me – and if it were early in the morning, the on-duty seismology tech usually wasn’t in an accommodating mood. Eventually, our local emergency manager got a pager that would display the Richter scale reading and the location automatically. I wanted one. He told me it cost $25,000. These days, I get alerted to big earthquakes all over the world, by email, for free (beyond the cost of the Internet connection).

A retired newsman I know recently visited Myanmar (Burma), and was able to send those of us on his friend list real-time photos of that beautiful country. He reminded me that it wasn’t all that long ago that war correspondents in Southeast Asia risked their necks just to get a few feet of battle film transported to a place where the major TV networks had access to it.

We all know how social media have changed relationships. There’s the old joke about two Facebook friends meeting for lunch and being bored to death -- so up-to-date on each others’ lives that they had nothing to say.

Perhaps that shows how this lovely connectedness has an invisible price. We can add all the wires, towers, satellites and bandwidth we want to make connections more and more real, but in the end, we have to accept that it’s all artificial tethering, and while incredibly useful, is only a substitute for real human contact.

Maybe it’s like this: Did you ever visit a place of great beauty with your camera, and were so concerned about getting pictures of it that you neglected to actually experience it? I’ve often thought that sometimes, you have to go back to the place  – without your camera -- just to soak it in.

But look, I’m not talking about unplugging here, not by a long shot, just recognizing that we have a constant challenge before us: putting all this electronic interaction in its place, and remembering that it’s part of life, not a substitute for it.