The Web

Subject: The Web 

It's funny how our lives have been made different by the smart phone and the iPad. 
In the distant past your compass was tiny. It consisted of your family and friends, your house and your work and the people you socialised with. Much else was unknown territory you were pretty much isolated from the outside world, living in your own comfort bubble. Now it's different, at the touch of a key you can navigate virtually anywhere in the world almost instantaneously, video conversations with people on the other side of the world bring them into your home as if they were in the next room. Google Earth lets you roam around old neighbourhoods as if you had never left, snooping on a friend who lives 10.000 miles away, starring in at his gate checking out the car, is so easy that we have few secrets left. Listening to radio stations reading out the traffic situation as if you were about to set off in the car yourself, the same old bottlenecks the same old problems remind you of a different life, one which absorbed you completely until you moved away adapting to yet another environment. 
How to do this or that is all catered for on You Tube, how to remove the oil pump from your car or build that wall on the he patio, who was the prime minister of so and so and when was the battle of .... fought. It's all there in the data bank stored in a server shared in the cloud, non stop service nano second retrieval of anything you wish to know. 
What was the doctors prognosis, does it match with what other doctors think, is this pain the pain described on the web page or is it something else.
Zooming down on central Africa or rustic New Zealand, or driving your car via sat nav in central London all via the device you hold in your hand or hunker down in bed with at night to go a roaming, like you do in a dream but with far greater control. 
Is this device a friend or foe, does it absorb too much of our time or is it a boon bringing to our fingertips the whole world and, if you are very lucky, the ability to read my blog every morning pontificating on events as they happen, in real time, from where ever you are.
The down side is the dark side of the web where opportunity allows the misfit to revel in their ability to say what they want or expose what we would rather not see. That strange warped personality who normally you would shun like the plague but who has crept in uninvited. For some this dark world is exciting for most sickening but on the whole as with most things it's your choice and I am always fascinated by the people who moan that they have been bullied or humiliated on line, why do you read it.
What of course it reveals is the state of mind of some people, how full of rage they are how vengeful how in torment they must be composing their vial messages towards people often they don't know and will never meet. Perhaps the message is their moment of glory, their moment of power (in a frustrating world where normally they have none) of does and don'ts, of such limitation in their own lives where they see so many successful lives whilst is a mess.
The railway track used to divide the posh from the poor.  Largely staying in your own neighbourhood your experiences were limited to those around you with whom you developed an affinity. Today the rich and their lifestyle is projected onto your mindset for the unhappy comparisons to fester and dissatisfaction to grow. Some will feel aggrieved, some will find strength in being in their own community but the web which highlighted the extremes within society at large also provides the rich and famous feedback which is sometimes unpalatable. 
There has always been the occasion for tittle tattle, talking behind someone's back saying unpleasant things about them but always attempting to remain anonymous for fear of direct confrontation, how satisfying it must seem to disburse falsehoods when far away, well out of the danger of receiving a bloody nose. 
The web for all its marvellous connectivity also allows the sort of connectivity we don't need but as with any connectivity it's relatively easy to just walk away.