Originally posted on sciy.org by Ron Anastasia on Wed 08 Nov 2006 05:58 PM PST
I'm posting below an item recently placed by my brother Brian into his blog on MySpace. It's about the impact the Internet has had on his life.
Brian was born, when I was 7 years old, with severe asthma, excema, and many allergies to both foods and inhalants. I'll always remember going to visit him on the second floor of our parents' home, in his special bedroom outfitted with air conditioning and electrostatic dust filters. The room felt cold and had a strange ozone smell from the dust filter, which would crackle and pop as it zapped dust particle. -- Brian was a tiny child and had to sleep in a special jacket; its sleeves were tied to his crib and it had stiff balsa wood inserts to keep him from scratching and infecting his allergic skin rashes. I could only imagine what it must have been like for him not being able to scratch what the doctors described as some of the most intense itches humans can feel.
His doctors predicted for many years that Brian would never live out the next year. But Mom and Dad never gave up on him, sacrificing much to pay for his medical expenses and frequent emergency trips to specialists at the Children's Hospital 25 miles away in Boston.
And Brian never gave up either. His bedroom became his home-office and he invented many ways to stay in touch with the world outside. He collected newspapers from around the United States, reading & then clipping and pasting thousands of them into award-winning scrapbooks. And he discovered music via the music columns in those newspapers and his growing record collections and by listening to many favorite AM radio stations, literally from around the world. (Late at night, he could sometimes hear stations from other countries, which provided him with a multicultural musical experience, and added to his growing musical appreciation and sophistication.)
Breakthroughs in asthma treatments including life-long therapy on prednisone, a cortisone derivative, eventually brought Brian's asthma under sufficient control that he could venture out of his room. He became a well-known music writer and critic with his own widely-read columns and eventually his own radio shows. He still has a show on the student station at WMUA, the Univ. of Massachusetts radio station in Amherst, where Brian, his lovely wife Meg (who manages the local bookstore), and their healthy two kids Atreyu and Morgan, have lived for many years.
I may be prejudiced, but imo, Brian's story is an authentic hero's journey. ~ ron
Sunday, November 05, 2006
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In defense of the Internet
There are three major broadcast television stations in Boston. and they all do a very good job on their local newscasts. While it is true in all forms of news delivery that "if it bleeds, it leads" (in other words, the local shootings and stabbings go on before the news that really might have an effect on us, watching these local newscasts every day gives you the impression that the newsrooms have police scanners that cover the entire eastern part of Massachusetts, most of Rhode Island, and at least half of New Hampshire. I often see stories about older men, about my age, posing online as being much younger and gaining the trust of underage girls. Then after a time these men set up an in-person meeting, and a sexual assault often results. Once these men are busted, the story is right at the top of the local newscasts on all three TV stations. While these stories are tragic and certainly traumatic for the young girl and her parents, I think the trauma is only increased by the presence of all the media. Don't get me wrong; these stations do a good job on politics and health issues, but the amount of crime stories that they run day after day can give you a warped sense of the real world and can eventually lead to a heightened sense of paranoia. When watching all these sensational stories on the local news, you have to keep in mind one of the reasons they are running them: broadcast media, along with the print media, are trying to find a way to keep the audience they have and not lose it to the Internet. The best example of this is the possible sale of the Boston Globe to three investors because it is worth only half the huge amount of money that the New York Times paid for it and the Worcester Telegram and Gazette about ten years ago. My use of computers goes back to roughly 1995 or so. I had a Commodore 64 computer, and I used an old TV set as a monitor. Back in those days, c. 1995. there used to be what were called Bulletin Boards, or BBS's. These things were run out of people's homes, and therefore only had one phone line available for people to use. So only one person could post something at a time, and then that person would have to wait and log back in later on to see what kind of reaction they got to their posting. Certainly there are deleterious effects that the Internet is having on our society. The first one that comes to mind is how our young people are getting obese from, among other things, sitting in front of the computer so much. But for people like me, who are disabled, the Internet is a true godsend. Since I am home alone all day while my wife works, I spend much of my day online chatting with all the wonderful people I have met in various sorts of chat rooms. One of those people is my friend Diane. Diane and I first met over a year and a half ago, and we still talk to each other at least twice a week. Diane and her husband lived in southwest England and were owners of a "public house", which is a combination restaurant, pub, and motel. In the time that we have been talking to each other, I have learned so much about life in Great Britain, and I have tried to share my knowledge of the U.S. with her. Diane and her husband had been owners of this particular public house for 11 years, and are finally retiring. As I write this, Diane and her husband and youngest daughter, along with their dog Duncan, are flying to Spain to start a new life in retirement. I look forward to having long chats with her about Spain to gain a better understanding of that country. And just last Friday night (actually Saturday morning), I met another person online who lives in Australia, and I look forward to learning about what that's like as well. That understanding of other countries and cultures, I think, is the essence of the Internet. For a disabled person, it is a window upon the world. But for society in general, if people use it to get to know someone and their culture really well, I think tensions between cultures will slowly begin to evaporate. 6:53 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment |
grateful
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