How Do I Love Thee?
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With Valentine's Day just around the corner, many of us turn our attention to matters of the heart, preparing to shower our significant other with flowers, cards, candies, the occasional edible undergarment, and promises of our unwavering devotion. Now I love my wife dearly, and she too will be the recipient of a cavalcade of gifts commensurate with my affection.
But I have been untrue. Alas, there is another.
The Internet has also captured my heart. And Valentine's Day presents the ideal opportunity to highlight some of the many things I love about the online universe. In no particular order, let me count the ways:
• I love the way so many peculiar moments are rescued from videotape cassettes on dusty storage room shelves and preserved for posterity.
• I love the way my 10-year-old daughter can't wait to jump on our computer after school to zoom around the globe from Cleveland to Disney World to the Grand Canyon to Red Square to Beijing.
• I love the way I can text a tweet from my cell phone when I'm stuck in traffic to share what I'm doing at that moment with the world, and it finds its way to multiple websites.
• I love the way I have liberated my children from the shackles of mac 'n cheese by virtue of thousands of easy-to-prepare recipes at my fingertips. (My wife loves that as well.)
• I love the way I can see what others think about a particular book (or DVD, or MP3, or pair of gravity boots) before I make the decision to cough up my hard-earned cash.
• I love the way my wife and kids actually sit around the computer and laugh at crazy game shows from exotic foreign lands.
• I love the way otherwise perfect strangers collaborate to make beautiful music together.
• I love the way I can sit in meetings, acting like I'm taking notes on my computer, while I'm secretly checking to see if Lebron got another triple double last night. (Not that I ever would, but I'm glad to know that I could.)
• I love the way that even ridiculous, overblown Hollywood blockbusters become infinitely more interesting when I come to understand little-known, behind-the-scenes facts about the production.
• I love the fact that, for as many ways as the Internet has changed our world these last 15 years or so, we've only just scratched the surface. And technologists, marketers, content-creators and information-seekers worldwide will face a multitude of exciting new opportunities and challenges in the years to come.
These are just a few of the many things I love about the Internet. Of course, there are also many things I don't love -- and many things which are still harder to do online than they really should be. But that's the topic of another post. I guess I could always save that for Labor Day.
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