The internet and split-second information access has penetrated almost every aspect of the world, directly or indirectly. I have had access to the internet for most of my life, the only interactive LED screen I remember well before that being a Nintendo game console. Looking back now I realize how much influence the internet has had on who I am as a person, the things I think about, the music I listen to, my politics and my religion. The access of information is mind-blowing and the world can never go back. Rather than relying on cultural traditions, people can now pick and choose the tenets of their religions. They can question and read openly about other ways of thought and life in different time zones or time eras. Rather than thinking oneself an outcast for sexual fetishes, people can now see that there are thousands or even millions more out there with kinks just as weird as their own (thank you Dan Savage!). Politically, grassroots activism has found a new medium to successfully organize. Traveling, though perhaps always a challenge, is now easier than ever.

In the past couple years, I have been trying to put my finger on a subtle shallowness of this medium that has helped to shape me as a person. It’s the difference between what I felt in Florida, Costa Rica, Colombia, and how I live here in the suburbs of Philadelphia. That is, life as I have experienced it virtually, and life as I have experienced it… really. And on a social level, I think the question of this divide has been expressed more conventionally as… "Although we have so much more technology, are we happier as human beings?" And the answer that I have contrived is that while information access has made life more convenient, and has allowed us to connect to people on the other side of the planet, and has opened mental gateways to unique and possibly happier ways of thought, we at the same time alienate ourselves from immediate environment and the people around us by substituting this consumption of information for human interactions and the 3-dimensional experience.

Anyone could go online, download Grateful Dead music, read their history, see recent concerts, buy themselves a t-shirt and overnight they’re a Deadhead. We can take on scenes that go back as far as recordable information, audiovisual within the last century, and written by many more. But is becoming a Deadhead through internet information the same as living and breathing in the era of the 1970s, seeing the live shows? How do we gauge the authenticity of such a claimed identity? How far can the virtual experience, or any adaptation of an identity through the acquisition of information, replace what we loosely call the "real" experience?

These are the things I think about when I consider my lifestyle and those of my kids when/if I have them. Aside from my aversions to the entire venture of having children otherwise, I knew there is definitely a diminishing something in the world that I would like to preserve for them, and only now have I been able to present it verbally. Who knows where information technology will be in their lifetimes? I’ll tell them, don’t settle for the virtual experience. I want their culture to be from the songs and stories they hear from me, from the food I prepare for them, from the places they see and the people they talk to... much as I would like my own life to be... the things that enrich my past and present are generated from the outside world. I understand, history cannot be turned, and if you asked me if I would prefer to live my life without internet access, I would be more than reluctant to say yes. The point is that I do not want to be consumed by what I call in its grand summation a virtual life, that is, where I see no difference between the things I acquire through the screen in front of me, and the things I acquire from the world outside it... where I feel nothing lost in this super-fast means of gaining information. But there is something lost, or better said, something sacrificed, because it is in the interest of something considered very good, the access to information and exchange of ideas... that is that interaction with the tangible world of which I am a native, which would have been the alternative means of acquiring the same information.