I started this blog post by asking my mom how she thinks I’ve changed since the internet came around. I could talk about the things that I think have changed – the internet has given me access to fandom, I’ve learned a ton of stuff from the ‘net that I might not otherwise know (not all of them good things – we haven’t really addressed the negative aspects of totally open access online, but my parents never could figure out how to instill parental controls faster than I could figure out ways around them…) but I honestly can’t remember a time before I was huddled in front of the family desktop, listening to the BEEEP BEEP WHIIIIIIIR of the dial-up loading. Oh, AOL.

I do remember a time before cell phones, however, but it’s actually hysterical to think about it. I was still dependent on my parents for transportation anyway, so planning ahead was the way of life, instead of my “we’ll figure it out later, call me,” attitude of today. I don’t know how much of the change was just technological access vs. growing up, but it’s a definite attitude shift that happened alongside my gaining a cell phone. So, I suppose that’s a change to take notice of.

IPods are also something that changed me a lot. Before my iPod, I barely listened to music at all, and I was only tentatively buying some CD’s for my CD player. These days, music is an integral part of my life, and my iPod is a huge source of entertainment for me. Youtube always allows me to preview songs before I spend money on them. So, that’s a change that I can trace to technological shift, but again, it happened while I was growing up, and I might have found more music anyway.

Back to my mother didn’t really notice any of that. Her perspective was that technology has made me far less social. She mentioned that I used to spend hours on the family computer, then my own computer, and now on my laptop. Holed up in my room. By myself. And she has a point, I guess. I can be “social” now, without ever leaving the comfort of my room, so why bother? Most of my face-to-face social life happens on Saturdays, when I can’t use the internet at all.

Before the internet was easily available in my house, leisure time was spent either playing actively or reading. I had the best Barbie collection of all my friends, and I played basketball and baseball depending on the season. I also regularly took out a double handful of books from the library every Friday to devour over the course of a week. Again, many of these things might have changed because I am older. But I can tell that the internet has cut directly into my reading time, and probably into my social time as well. How many times has my cell phone rung and I don’t want to pick up because I have 23 tabs open, three videos running, and a paper hovering somewhere in the background and being social just takes more effort? How many times have I chosen not to go out because hauling myself into the city is just more annoying than watching the latest episode of Glee on Hulu?

Of course, I’m more in touch with more distant friends, with my clever usage of facebook, email and skype. But overall, no matter how much I bemoan the fact that these websites are cheap replacements for real interaction, I still end up using them to stay in touch with more local friends. Technology seems to build a lot of barriers between people in some ways, even while it provides outlets for meeting new people through forums and classes. So my mother had a point – from her perspective, I do favor the internet over family interaction whenever I’m home. I argue that I’m doing homework, which I am, but I’m doing it alone, in my room, instead of at the dining room table like I did in the days of notebooks and paper homework.

Did technology change me? Certainly, no question about it. I’ve always been tech-savvy, the kind of girl who’d rather take apart old computers than watch TV, and I can’t imagine a time when I wasn’t surrounded by technology. So I can’t actually understand how technology changed me, since there hasn’t been a time to compare. Instead, I’ll talk about how technology influenced me.

Technology made me a better friend…and maybe also a worse one. I’m one of those people who hates talking on the phone, and I took to email correspondence so eagerly that even the friends I see every day know better than to call me- they text message or email instead. Because of this, I’ve found it easy to keep in touch with long-distance friends. But then again, because of this I’ve grown lazy when it comes to keeping in touch with those who don’t use email or texting as often as most, and I rarely speak to them anymore.

Technology made me a better student…and maybe also a worse one. I’ve become more curious about things I learn, now that all the information is at my fingertips via phone or computer. Then again, I’ve also gotten lazy. If I can’t do it on the computer, I tend to forget about it. Rarely will I do research through books, which are more detailed, if I can just Google something and get a faster (if not more elaborate) answer to my questions. And this is barely the tip of the iceberg. I can barely divide anymore now that I’m accustomed to using a calculator. I’ve lost other basic skills now that simple technology takes care of them all.

Technology made me a better reader…and maybe also a worse one. My library’s website, eBay, Amazon.com’s used books…all have allowed me to get a hold of books I would never buy at their original price, since I don’t like to buy anything I don’t already know that I like. Sites like Scribd, Wattpad, and Google Books have also allowed me to sample book before reading. And the interpretations for poetry and classics that I’ve found online have definitely enhanced my reading comprehension skills. But there’s also the downside to that, the amount of books that I won’t bother reading (for school or for fun) because I can just research them online and get a sufficient amount of information to write or talk about them. The worst case of this was two semesters ago, when I’d call up the Sparknotes page for whichever chapter we were reading on my phone during class as my only source for discussion. And there’s also fanfiction, which (as well-written as it can be) has spoiled me so thoroughly that I rarely read actual books anymore- I actually print out pages and pages of fanfiction in tiny print for the Sabbath, when I can’t go online.

Technology made me a better thinker…and maybe also a worse one. I’ve already discussed the negative aspect to this, the idea that someone else’s research easily becomes your thoughts, but there’s so much more to it than that. On online forums, I’ve been forced to reevaluate ideas that seem so clear to me and those around me when they’re challenged by others outside of my circles. And I’m also forced to explain myself, therefore bringing me to a greater understanding of what exactly I’m saying and clarifying and organizing it for myself.

Technology made me a better writer. I can’t think of any ways that this has really backfired on me. I know that some people complain that online slang has diminished their writing to a series of “lols” and words like “nite” and “tho,” but writing online, whether in forums and discussions or even long emails to friends, has only made me more verbose. Little things like Microsoft Word’s thesaurus and this list have helped me keep my writing fresh and interesting…though I admit that I’m not much of a poet anymore. For some reason, it’s difficult for me to write poetry by computer instead of by hand.

Technology made me a worse speaker. I honestly run out of things to say these days, when I can’t type them first. My train of thought isn’t as clear when I can’t see it stated before I “send” it, even when I’m casually talking to some of my friends. I’ve become so accustomed to looking at a screen (or talking into a phone) that face-to-face communication just isn’t as clear.

So it looks like I’m on the way toward becoming a recluse author, based on this. But honestly, aren’t we all, to some degree? We’re shut off and opened up all at once with technology, it’s just another contradiction with which we live. There’s that old slogan, “Guns don’t kill people. People kill people,” and I’m inclined to agree that it applies in terms of technology. It is what we make of it- blessing or curse, aid or detriment, danger or safety. It’s only a tool, one that can influence us over time just as much as age, location, family, health, education, and other factors in our ever-changing world do.

Researching for school is one of the only times that I truly try to examine a source for legitimacy and approach the internet distrustfully. (The other times are when I’m searching a political topic that is important to me, when I try to stick mainly to news sources or primary documents, or religious subject when I take anything I find with a giant grain of salt). This means that most of the time, when I’m using the internet, I’m pretty inclined to trust the first few sources I find, and my searches tend not to be all that complex. But for fun, I decided to walk through a search I’m actually doing, as opposed to coming up with one.

Superhero comics being what they are in this country, most characters have decades of storylines and continuity to draw upon whenever there is a story being told. What this means for the readers is that while reading a story, you need to know a lot more than what is being told to you on the page. For example, if I decide to pick up a Superman comic tomorrow, I need to know that Superman was an alien baby sent from his dying planet to Earth so that he could have his own life. I’d need to know that he was raised as Clark Kent, though he was originally named Kal-El. I would need to know that he works as a reporter, and is married to another reporter named Lois Lane, and that they work at the Daily Planet newspaper together, along with Editor-in-Chief Perry White and photographer Jimmy Olsen. I would need to know all of that because the comic can’t explain everything to me every time I read it! But then there’s a problem – sure Superman is pretty popular and easy. But there are hundreds of superheroes at this point! How can I know every single one every time I pick up a comic? How can I know their friends and allies and history every time I want to read a story?

Well, twenty years ago it was a big problem. It still is a problem, actually, but a much smaller one, because of the internet. I can just grab a character’s name and plug it into Google and see what happens.

For this search, I chose the superhero Damage/Grant Emerson, a minor side character with an incredibly confusing history (although Supergirl and Hawkman could give him a total run for his money, check it out if you don’t believe me). I happen to be reading a comic in which he makes an appearance, and I realized I know almost nothing about him, so I decided to go do some research.

Before Google, I’ll start off at Wikipedia, land of shared information. I type in “damage comics” because most people tend to refer to superheroes by their heroic nicknames rather than their real names. I get this page:

From a quick glance, I can tell that the first result is the one I want, so I click on it.

Hmmm, it’s a pretty long entry, considering that he’s a minor character. I skim the breakdown of the page at the top, and notice that there is a lot of focus on his role in the past five years or so. (Blackest Night is a new series coming out, and Grant only joined the Justice Society recently.) But when I look through his fictional character history, I notice that he was a member of the Titans. Perfect!

And then I open a new tab, because I have a tendency to leave and tab with information open until I am totally done with it, and run my searches through multiple websites at the same time.

I go to Titanstower.com, which has always been a great site to find out about any characters that were ever members of the Teen Titans. I check out the meeting room, which has all the character bios and information. I noticed on the Wikipedia page that Grant joined the “federally sponsored Titans, led by Arsenal,” so I click on “aresenal’s new titans team.” I get a page listing all of the different heroes who joined that particular incarnation of the Titans.  I click on Damage to find out more information.

The best part about TitansTower as opposed to almost every single other site I’ve been able to find is the pictures. Titans Tower goes out of it’s way to show different scans of the character during key moments, so I really get a feel for what he looks like and how the different scenes took place. It’s much more informative than just the text alone.

Now I have two tabs open with two different biographies of the same character. But both of these biographies focus on different information, which is great. I read through them both, piecing together most of Grant’s past. It’s hard for any one biography to put together all the information about a single character because there’s always so much out there. After I read the biographies, I check out the information at the bottom of each page. Wikipedia gives me a list of sources and a few links. Most of the sources are comic books, which are a pain to track down in real life. There are ways to download them illegally, but I would prefer not to do that, because I want to support the comic book industry. When I check out the links, I notice that one of them is the TitansTower biography I have open in another tab! So I open up the other link in another tab.

The DCU (standing for DC Universe) Guide is a great resource for character biographies as well, but it looks like it was put together years ago, and I don’t like the choice of a black background with white letters. I end up on this site a lot, but I almost never go there automatically because the layout bothers me. Aesthetics on the internet are really important.

Ok, then I go back to the TitansTower page to see if there are are any other sources there I can open up. The TitansTower page has a great Essential Reading section for if I ever do decide to hunt down comics on the character.

The comics cited by Wikipeda

just happen to be those that were necessary to cite for the facts given on the page. They don’t give much of a background on the character, and most of them have been published fairly recently. The list on the TitansTower webiste is a list of comics that are important to the character if I want to pursue my search any further. There is also a detailed analysis of Grant as a character and of the Titans group he was a part of, and a commissioned drawing from a comic book artist at a convention.

Best of all is the timeline:

Even though it’s incomplete, it’s extremely hard to keep track of characters in a serialized format like comics. Imagine if your favorite character from a TV show – Jack Bauer, for example, – could appear in any TV show any week. So, one night he’s on 24, and the next night he makes a guest appearance on Law and Order and CSI and two night later he shows up on Psych. Then back to 24, which is the only show you’re actually watching. But the character did stuff on all those other shows! That’s a part of his history now, and he might reference his experiences at any time! That’s what reading comics is like.

Ok, the TitansTower page doesn’t have any more helpful links. I’ll leave it open anyway, and start really reading the DCU Guide page. This page has a more detail on his background, but less on his more recent actions like the Wikipedia page. It also doesn’t like out to any other interesting pages.

I do a quick swing by Google Images to see if I can find any other scans or info on Grant. I plug in a bunch of different searches, “grant emerson damge” “damage comics” “damage titans” “damage justice society,” etc. But overall, I’m not finding anything that hasn’t already been shown on the separate sites I’ve been exploring.

At this point, I’d probably stop pursuing the search on Grant unless I had found something amazingly interesting that I wanted to find more details. In fact, if I weren’t recording my every action, I would probably have opened a dozen new tabs by now searching stuff on other characters. I don’t know if anyone is looking at the pages I’m linking too, but Grant is an insanely connected character, he has team-ups and cross-overs with a whole bunch of different characters and he’s joined three separate teams at one time or another, so he’s connected to each of the characters on teams with him and at one point he saved the world in a super-mega-crossover event, so who knows how many different people he’s connected to! But I have a solid grasp of his background at least, and I feel comfortable enough that next time I run across a reference to him somewhere, I won’t be confused!

We were one of the first families in the neighborhood to get Internet, and one of the last to give up dial-up, so I’ve long ago grown accustomed to getting results in as few steps as possible. For every page I had to wait to load, I wasted at least a minute of computer time, so I had to quickly figure out all the little tricks of the search engine- the minus button, the quotations around phrases, the “site:” option… This is nothing novel now, but I remember, nearly a decade ago, showing this to my friends and amazing them with my “Internet savvy.” Now, of course, we have Wi-Fi in our home and I’ve managed to string routers through the house so that even our shoddy ones give us high-speed Internet, but the tricks I’ve learned over time have become so habitual that I’m more likely to use Google to search a site than to use the offered search bar on the actual website.

I’ll admit, when it comes to research, that I take the layman’s route instead of the student’s. I don’t use EBSCOhost or J-STOR or even Google scholar. Instead, the first place I’ll look when gathering information is Wikipedia. I know that it can be inaccurate, but I’m not going there to quote information. I go there because information there is clear, readable, and well-organized. Wikipedia gives me the outline that I need, the important elements to my research topic that I might have to investigate and, perhaps most importantly, a series of links in each article’s bibliography that lead me to various articles and websites devoted to my topic matter. Once I have that, I have more than enough information.

Interestingly, in one of my classes, we’ve been divided into groups to research the same topics, and today, while collaborating with other groups, I met a girl who was researching the same topic as I was. She searched the typical databases and found very little on the relationship between IQ and depression. I just Googled the same thing and found countless articles. The tricky part is ensuring that the articles are legitimate and usable- it isn’t easy to falsify information so well that it’s not clearly false, but it’s possible. So for each article I found, I had to make sure that the information was reliable. A program from a conference of the “International Society for Intelligence Research” looks alright, but first I had to check and see if the ISIR really existed, and if it was a legitimate scientific source. So I went to their website and looked at their list of members and websites. Bingo- the American Psychological Association is one of their affiliates, and I trust the APA. Of course, even that can be falsified, but at this point, enough proof points in the direction of the link being legitimate that I can use it as a source.

Another link led me to Bill Allin’s scribd page, so for that, I went to his website and researched him and the book he’s written. For this one, I couldn’t find as many details that would prove that he wasn’t just a sociologist with aspirations to propagate his own personal ideas, so I pushed it to the back of the list. Even an official-looking website can be made by a phony, after all. If his book had been published by a publisher I recognized, instead of “Writers’ Collective,” a self-publisher, I would have readily moved his articles and books toward the forefront of my list. Sadly, this wasn’t so, and I had to select a different source on which to focus.

I think that, despite the fact that my searches don’t go through the classic academic circuits, I actually gain more from them than I would from the student search methods. It’s far simpler to find an article and follow applicable links, or to read a simple summary of an article written by a non-professional before going on to the article. Database resources might have handy articles, but the selection is much more limited. The Internet is there for us to benefit from shared knowledge, and so many excellent analyses are skipped out on because they aren’t the original documents. So I’ll continue counting on my fellow students online to help me find and collect sources and information.

I was watching a news-oriented talk show, and one of the guests made a claim about healthcare in this country.  It was a factual claim, and a controversial one, and she made it very authoritatively, but the host did not believe her.  “Come on,” he said.  “That can’t be right.”

“You can Google it yourself!” she told him.  “I’m sure there are people with their iPhones right here in the audience googling it right now.”  The camera didn’t show the studio audience, but I imagined dozens of little screens lighting up and dozens of (tens of dozens?) or fingers rapidly tapping out search terms.

But would those fingers find and those screens show?  Try googling any even somewhat controversial claim (global warming, immigration reform, pick your topic), and you’ll find thousands and thousands of bits of information–some accurate, some objective, some factual, some polemic, some funny, some dishonest–the whole wide range.

“To google” is a verb (and, sure, it includes Bing and all the other search engines), and talk-show guests aren’t the only ones who will tell you to “just google it” (or they may even throw another word in there–like in the page that the picture of Bart Simpson above links to–sorry about that link.  I didn’t choose the language!).  But there’s more than just googling involved.

If Google is the massive collective brain, with all the information of the universe stored in it (and I’m not sure that’s exactly what it is), then it also includes all the junk and garbage that we all keep (maybe longer than we should) in our own individual brains.  Lyrics to songs you used to like in third grade, the best way to unwrap a Tootsie Roll, the hate-letter you wrote to someone who annoyed you on the subway–it’s all there, along with the exact population of Tallahassee, Florida and the military expenditures of Zimbabwe and the complete works of Jane Austen and a very good recipe for paella.

“Google-Fu” (like “Kung-Fu,” right?) is a skill of self-defense and even of attack–it’s the true power today.  Just entering a search term like “global warming” isn’t a skill, it’s not even really something that should be called searching.  And taking that first link on the results page is even less of a skill.  Setting up a search, refining the results.  If your google-fu is truly strong, you can get the real result, the right result, quickly and efficiently.  And you can know the result you’ve got is the best one and be able to explain why.

But how do we teach people these skills? There aren’t google-fu academies, and while some schools (particularly libraries) do their best to help students with these skills, others just try to prevent or limit what students do with that massive collective brain.  It seems that the secrets of searching, of learning how to ask, are too often shared just by word-of-mouth.  Or not shared at all.  Can we change that? Should we?

Compare a few significant social interactions in your life–especially if some of them are mediated by writing…especially writing on a screen.

I’ve always preferred writing to talking as a method of communication. I find that when we write, we’re more likely to actually transmit information than when we speak to each other. And as much as I enjoy chatting with friends for hours, when it comes to the less inane, it seems to me like a waste of time and energy to fumble around a topic instead of getting to the point. I’m often annoyed when an old classmate will call me and try to make “small talk,” when all she really wants is my help, and we’ve rarely spoken beyond that. Why is there a need beyond the original greeting to act as if she’s interested in what I’m doing? I know that she wants something, she knows that I know, and once we’ve covered the fact that we’re both doing well, there’s no need to inquire further. Of course, this isn’t always so, but it’s usually clear when a person is genuinely interested. I might come off as a bit jaded, but I’ve honestly no patience for it.

On the other hand, there are real friends, people who want to speak to me and to whom I want to speak, and those people I make a point of calling from time to time, or (preferably) seeing them in person. In those cases, inane conversation is really an important aspect of the friendship, and really very enjoyable. We’ll email and text message, too, of course, but generally, these relationships are in person.

I bring the latter forward now because I’d like to compare it to my online interactions with absolute strangers I have never met, and probably will never meet. (And no, I’m not talking about following the Dalai Lama on Twitter.) I’ve met these people through my online interests, generally on a fandom-related site, and they know me only by my handle.

My online relationships are fairly one-dimensional. While my friends in the real world know about my family, other friends, interests, goals, and everything in between, my online friends know about one particular interest of mine. Granted, they know far more about it than my real world friends would ever even care to learn, but they don’t know me, just that one aspect of my identity.

But my online interactions aren’t about getting to know other people. They’re about learning and communicating and delving deeply into whichever shared interest we have. Sometimes, they do dip into the real world- for example, one of the contributors on one forum once asked for help on a newspaper article she was writing on a certain topic, one my sister knows much about firsthand. I was able to connect them via email, and two completely unrelated people on different continents shared information. However, as a rule, I don’t ask for information unless if it’s offered. We’re united only by our love for a fandom, and that’s more than enough for a relationship so limited.

This topic doesn’t mention learning, but I’d like to address it, too, since it’s applicable here. I feel that when I’m speaking to friends in the fandom, I’m much more likely to be open to new information than when it’s taught to me by a real world friend. I think that I associate the Internet and my online friends with fun and enjoyment, and one of my favorite things to do online is to read essays written by online friends. For example, I took a class on mythology last year in college, and found that a topic that had greatly interested me before the class became far duller when taught in a school setting. But a few weeks ago, one of my fellow posters on one site took The Odyssey and The Iliad and compared them to the storyline for several seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (here, if anyone’s interested). And that I was much more interested in reading; and, in fact, for the first time since taking the mythology class, I took out my copy of The Odyssey to reread it. There’s a certain, more casual attitude in writing when it’s over the Internet (case in point: this would be far more formal if I weren’t writing it for an online course), and because of that, there’s far more openness to learning and teaching. It doesn’t matter that I’m still in college and half of my friends of livejournal are forty-year-old professionals; they read what I write and treat it with respect, like they would any of their peers’ work. On the Internet, a screen conceals us all and forces us to treat others as equals unless our online behavior makes that impossible. Without race, gender, age, or other external factors influencing our opinions, we really can teach and learn from each other with no reservations.