Thankful for connectedness
We need access to community and ideas.
It's Thanksgiving in the U.S., a holiday that has morphed from a single day of giving thanks and gathering with friends/family to an entire week of online shopping deals and abject consumerism. Such is The American Way. My kids don't have school the whole week, so, including weekends, there are nine days of no school. My house is a flurry of Thanksgiving leftovers and Christmas decorations, and my middle child wants to brave the holiday shoppers today.
To be honest, I struggled with what to write today. I always have a giant backlog of ideas, but I felt I should write something to acknowledge Thanksgiving week. It's hard to feel thankful when you're worried about things like access to women's health care (a new report from ProPublica found that another woman died in Texas after receiving inadequate care). Or worried about LGBTQ+ rights for people in your family. That's been the past several weeks for me: anxiety and concern. A little bit of fear. These feelings swell while the world is telling me that I'm supposed to feel thankful.
Yesterday, I listened to a podcast of the 100 Most Iconic Technologies, including everything from aqueducts to self-driving cars to social media. I've always loved technology, been an avid user, and truly have built a career around technology. I became immersed in software back in college when I worked at a bank, which led me to work for a tech company. The Internet enabled me to work remotely starting back in 2006. I joined web-based meetings and used a VoIP phone system. As long as I had an internet connection, I could work from anywhere.
And The Internet has made my writing career possible. It took us away from a world of print journalism, where editors and publishers were gatekeepers — deciding whose voices "deserved" to be heard. Now, any work can be put out into the world.
Of course, that has led to new problems (like misinformation), but, as Roxane Gay points out in a New York Times opinion column, blame also falls on the shoulders of people who consume such information and believe it — without the social responsibility of verifying what they read. She writes, "We must refuse to participate in a mass delusion. We must refuse to accept that the ignorance on display is a congenital condition rather than a choice."
But The Internet has also created a sense of community, where people within our physical proximity fall short or can't give us what we need. Anyone who can search and type can find their people.
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