My first memory of using the Internet was at school in grade four. Although I wasn’t allowed to watch it, South Park had become an obsession for kids my age. I thought it was cool as shit that I could download and print pictures of Stan, Kyle, and the other characters to tape to my bedroom wall. It wasn’t as good as watching the show, but it was the closest I was going to get for the time being.
Another memory — one that I would rather forget — occurred a couple years later. I was working on a collaborative class project and the group I was in had to exchange email addresses. I didn’t have my first @hotmail address yet, so instead of giving out my parents’ email or admitting that I didn’t have an address, I made one up and wrote it down on the sheet of paper that was being passed around. I rushed home after school to create my first email account.
Being horribly behind the curve, I didn’t realize that every email address required a .com or .ca suffix for your message to actually be delivered to its intended recipient. My messages from my brand new address never were received and, needless to say, my mark was not very good. My contributions to the assignment were lost in cyberspace. I was the laughing-stock of my class and had a hard time living it down.
How far I have come since that display of utter ineptitude! Now I sleep with my laptop on a chair beside my bed. I have difficulty falling asleep without a podcast playing or Simpsons episode streaming into my ear. When I wake up, I don’t make breakfast or shower until I’ve checked my email, at least three different news websites, and Facebook. When I leave the house, I continue to check my email and the news from my iPhone. Grade seven Sean would be so proud.
My life is digital. I would be crawling up the wall if I lost my phone or had my Internet disconnected for more than a few hours. While this might sound like a horrifying addiction, I know I’m not alone. There’s comfort in the knowledge that most people my age, as well as most who are younger and many who are older, would find themselves in a very similar state of mind if they had their technology taken away even just for one day. I don’t think it’s my place to say whether this “addiction” is a good or bad thing, but I certainly strive to understand the issues that surround our reliance on technology.
For the third and final Varsity Magazine of the school year we have commissioned a wide array of stories, photo essays, and infographics that examine the subtle and overt ways that digital technology shapes human life in the twenty-first century.
From the ongoing debate over net neutrality, brilliantly elucidated here by iSchool PhD candidate John Harris Stevenson, to issues relating to Internet censorship and cyberwarfare, this magazine aims to explain the serious concerns relating to digital life.
Worried about the future of journalism? Will Sloan sure is! His dystopian vision of media in the late-twenty-first century is both wonderfully satirical and profoundly unsettling.
But not everything in here is written with such an ominous tone. Our tongue-in-cheek “How to Internet” guide (featuring U of T President David Naylor) is just as informative as the net neutrality article, but it conveys more practical information that will help you discover new music, manage (and waste) your time more effectively, and make an educated decision when making the leap to a smartphone.
It’s our most ambitious magazine of the year in terms of concept and content, but I think it’s a resounding success.
101010111000011101100111011100111,
