Sea Change




There is a sea change going on in my life and probably in your life, too. It has everything to do with the Internet and nothing to do with social media sites.




First, I no longer have dictionaries or encyclopedias around. I have access to more resources on-line than I could possibly have at my desk and frankly, they’re much easier to use. What the Internet lacks in depth is certainly compensated for by breadth. I still have grammar and usage books around for the occasional “what the hey,” moment, but Word and other programs are getting better at these searches, too.




Second, three or more times a day I use the Internet to retrieve information that I have forgotten, or never heard of before. Maps, the price of an item, newspapers, magazines, biographies – anything I would formerly have gone to an atlas, catalog, almanac, telephone book or the Yellow Pages (both now all but defunct) I now go to the Internet first. I am pretty good at sussing out bias in a piece, but I know I can be fooled. I am worried when I see something in a thread in a blog or site I don’t know and I always give politics a wide berth – and I rarely even read e-mails from friends with a fat paragraph of other recipients, but I get a lot of information from the Internet.




All of the above makes me edgy when I don’t have access to the Internet. But this is not the sea change I am talking about.




Last week, I watched virtually (no pun intended) nearly every game of the NCAA basketball tournament – Live. Yesterday, I watched episodes of Sherlock Holmes (with Jeremy Brett), Gunsmoke, and Have Gun Will Travel on YouTube. Today, I watched the CBS Evening News on-line probably before people on the west coast got to see it on TV. I also check in with the BBC for their five minute update audio update of the news every morning (a news junkie, their one-minute video update isn’t enough for me). Right now I’m listening to set of songs by The Rolling Stones et.al on Grooveshark. The last time I talked to my sister in Wyoming it was for 59 minutes. And I am looking forward to The Master’s Golf Tournament – Live of course. And most of this stuff is free. All of it would be free if my sister would download SKYPE, but under two-cents a minute from Asia I can’t complain.




I did all this in Ayutthaya, Thailand (you can find Ayutthaya – for some even Thailand - with Google Maps). TV is coming to the web – and that’s a sea change of major proportions.