Song #74 Happy Online

(Listen to a very raw version)

People say that I've got grey hair
I must say that I don’t care
Everyone strugglin’ to go on line
You might be a friend of mine

Tapping keys there across the world
Perhaps a lost and lonely girl
Who turns to the web to find her heart
With someone who’ll be apart
Far away

Everyone wants their own home page
Aiming to be the next web sage
I tried to find you but your site was down
You must have been out of town

Planning dreams to take me away
It’s time to go I just can’t stay
Email my friends to say goodbye
It’s time to go off line
I’m goin’ away

Then it happened - life fell apart
My friend dear life lost its spark
No urls ; no send, no reply
Just tropical heat and a whole lotta rain
In my eyes
Something had died
Someone has died

Gee it’s good to be back on line
Where real life can’t touch me and I feel fine
Say hi to my friends who have no face
They got no pain and they got no place

They can’t see that I got grey hair
And that’s why I say that I don’t care
They can’t see the tears in my eyes
I could be laughing and I could be wise
And I’m far away
Happy on line
It’s email time
Happy on line

(I don't mind 404. I don't mind server down. I'm happy online.)

(Copyright Michael Coghlan 1997)

Commentary: A song about life online and how much I enjoyed it. There is a kind of serious but flippant aspect to the first part of the song before it goes into a darker place. Flags the realisation that you can also go online to escape the hardships of the real world. As you can see this was written long before the advent of social media.

What then, are our responsibilities, as elders, in this world which carries the scent and spoor of our youthful enthusiasms?

A colleague on the TALO email list (yes there are some still) posed this question in regard to our collective role in promoting use of the internet before it all went wrong. I felt compelled to answer: 

I don’t know if this was a serious question but I’m going to assume it was. Because this has been on my mind. Where the Internet and social media has led us has me worried. And when Tim Berners-Lee says much the same I feel my concerns are well founded.

I’m trying to reconcile my own part in all of this. Like many on this list I was an enthusiastic advocate for teaching and learning online. I don’t know if I was an advocate of the Internet in particular. I was certainly fascinated by its potential, and what it might do to our lives. But I don’t think I was an advocate per se in the way that people like Mark Pesce may have been. I remember Pesce boasting unashamedly that ‘the Internet is coming and I am a pusher!”

I still stand by the Internet’s potential to improve education, in the hands of experienced and wise facilitators. But there are still so few of them. But after 22 years of watching its impact I am worried about what the internet and mobile technologies have done to our lives.

I am feeling a sense of professional embarrassment. How can I/we not have seen this coming? For me it’s connected with the election of Trump. That stunned me. I was one of those who thought it would never happen. Don’t laugh, but I thought humanity was evolving to a point where trogladytes like Trump would be left behind.  It was as if his election snapped me out of a naïve dream.

Similarly I knew the potential of social media to spread evil, but like all good fairytales I thought good would prevail. And it still might. But with all the good it has done, it has connected all those with a message of hate and division. It fosters unrest based on lies and misinformation in Ukraine, genocide in Myanmar, subverts democratic processes, and provides a platform for murderers, racists and child pornographers to peddle their wares.

And I do think it’s time to call a spade a spade and declare as T Bone Burnett has done that it is stealing our culture on the basis of some flimsy pretext like ‘all knowledge wants to be free’.

So I do feel like making a public apology quite honestly, where I can admit that I was naive about a lot of things. That may absolve my conscience but do I/we who were at the vanguard of the changes have a responsibility to try now and fix up the mess and redress some of the mistakes?