I love the internet for many reasons. I remember a time when the internet didn’t exist and I was using a dial up modem to log onto someone’s private computer. In fact I remember a place I dialed into eons ago named Pirate’s Palace where one could get video games for free. I can still hear the noise of the model as it dialed this baud location and got a connection.
Today with just a few keystrokes, a person can find just about anything and everything on the web. From game playing to doing research, from looking for a person to connecting to someone, the list today of what the internet can do seems infinite. Unfortunately, as much as I love the web, there are also many things happening to society as the internet grows that I don’t love at all.
There is a much easier access now to engage in addictions such as gambling or porn. Information about a person that once was deemed private now seems to float around readily on the web. In-person communication once existed as the only way to connect is now slowly drifting away as more and more opt for living in a cyber world versus the real world. And something I noticed recently that I’ve been trying to tune out is the vast numbers of opinions that are being placed on the web about anything. There are opinions on places to go eat, on places to go on vacation, on all types of businesses, on different types of medical, holistic healing, and nutritional paths, on movies, and on people directly as well.
Recently with my vacation, I went to a place that had gotten some seriously terrible reviews on the web from other people that had travelled to the resort I was going to. So many different aspects of the resort had been trashed in online postings. I had decided to go against what they were saying and had booked anyway. Ironically in the end, I loved the property, the hotel on the property, and all the things the resort had to offer. For me it was a five star experience. The same thing has happened for me as well with restaurants that have gotten awful reviews online. I’ve gone and experienced them for myself and felt completely opposite having had amazing meals. With movies, so often lately they seem to be getting more and more bad reviews through places that pool them together such as rottentomatoes.com. I’ve gone to many of those poorly reviewed movies and in the end loved them completely and bought them later on DVD. In the medical and holistic realms, there are many different ways of approaching the journey of healing. Much of the healing techniques that I have tried and gotten success from have been denounced somewhere on the web if a search was done on them.
I’ve come to the conclusion with the internet that while it may be good for doing research on finding someone or something, learning the history of anything, or locating phone numbers and addresses for various things, it’s become a dumping ground for people to express their opinions on just about everything. I can’t speak for anyone else, but I know that I don’t want to live my life based upon the opinions of what someone else is saying about anything. My journey in life to be more God centered has led me to a place of trusting my own inner soul’s guidance. Many of the things that I’ve visited, dined out at, watched in a theater, or gotten healing benefit from can be found on the web with scathing reviews and warnings to not go pursue. What I’ve learned in all this is that sometimes it’s better to not do any research in the cyber world, and instead to go experience it for myself. This way I don’t become biased by someone else’s thoughts or feelings, and my experience becomes just that, my experience.
I’d rather not spend my life avoiding things that people have bad opinions about, especially those I don’t even know other than through their keystrokes left behind on the internet. Some of the best things that have happened to me in my life come from doing exactly the opposite of the mass opinions that now exist on the web. My only advice to anyone when it comes to the internet is this. Just because someone has posted one of their bad experiences on anything online, doesn’t mean your experience with that same thing is going to be the same. You never know, it may end up being one of the best things you ever pursued in your life.
Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson