I LOVE THE INTERNET

Three reasons from this weekend that I love the Internet:

1. My wife and I have needed to go furniture shopping for a long time. We’ve lived in our house for over five years and still haven’t bought some basic furniture, like a kitchen table or an entertainment center. So last month, we marked off this weekend as a time we’d block off on our schedules to go to various furniture stores, comparison shop, and if not make purchases at least narrow things down. Well, the weekend came, and the weather was crappy, as were our moods, with both of us feeling a little sick. We decided to start by walking around the house, taking notes and measurements. Then we got in front of our computer, went to a major furniture seller’s website, and started surfing. Next thing you know, we’d taken off our shoes, emptied our pockets, and settled down in front of the screen. We were able to toggle between departments and sites, find out about measurements, compare those measurements with our measurements, and look at individual pieces in different colors and in different settings. At least a half-dozen times, we got up, walked into the next room, and talked about where particular pieces could go. The whole shopping experience took about 90 minutes, or in other words about the amount of time we would have allocated to the driving and parking alone if we had left the house.

2. I remember a Fast Company article in the late 1990s talking about the “New York effect” of the Internet. When you live in New York, you can have meetings of people with obscure interests because there are enough potential members to support such a group. There probably isn’t a Thai restaurant in a small town in Kansas, for example, but there might be a group that meets in New York of Thai/vegan/Atkins chefs. So the Internet can be a forum for communities of people who are geographically disparate but who share similar, if obscure, interests. And I am finding those like-minded people here in the blogosphere. Urban Christians, adoptive parents, supporters of cancer survivors, baseball lovers . . . you name my narrow interest, and the World Wide Web has a group of people who share that interest. The blogosphere has been for me a source of information, belonging, and sharpening. And it’s happened without requiring any changes to my schedule, any hunting down for the right people, or any travel arrangements.

3. I took my Public Management final this morning at home in my pajamas. It was a take-home, closed-note, two-hour-limit exam. The professor was kind enough to provide an electronic alternative to physically going down to the school, picking up the exam, and either taking it there or taking it home and opening it up later. I asked him to email me the exam late this week, and he obliged, reminding me not to open the document until I was ready for my two-hour timer to start ticking. So this morning, I opened the document at 8:07 am, scribbled some notes on blank sheets of paper that I had spread out across my desk, cross-checked my notes with our course syllabus (the only exception to the closed-book rule), and then feverishly typed in my answers. At 10:07 am, I emailed the document back to my professor (of course regretting that I had misbudgeted my time and had not had time to proofread my answers). How convenient was that? You have to love dictating the when and where of your activities.

So there you have it: furniture shopping, socializing, and taking an exam. Three things that people did a generation ago, three things that I did in ways that people a generation ago couldn’t have done.