We love the web, you and I
Giles Turnbull
And that's an echo of the very first thing that I ever posted on
gilest.org: "Hello, my name is Giles, and I love the internet."
That's meant sincerely, I say it *despite* the spam, the arrogant
bloggers, the popups, the YouTube commenters, and the
design-by-committee. There's so much that's awful and depressing but
that's not what draws me and Edd and all of you into it. No, what
we're attracted to is the potential. Even after all these years of
being online most of the time, most days, we can still trip over
something challenging, exciting, interesting or even beautiful. The
web brings all this stuff to us directly, and our minds are stimulated
further.
I couldn't write a weekly column about it if I didn't make at least
one of those discoveries every week. I'm still finding them, and still
enjoying them.
The web's stuffed full of crap. Our secret - yours, mine, Edd's, most
of the people we know - is that we can filter out the crap, see past
it, ignore it most of the time. Our eyes and our mouse-button fingers
know the paths to avoid, so we can skirt round the rubbish and
concentrate our time on the good stuff.
Our friends and acquaintances (the offline people we know - mine are
the mums at the school gate, yours might be the folks at the book
group or the football club or the regulars at the pub) think we're
weird because we spend so much time online, but that's only because
*they think we see the same web that they do*. And we don't at all.
Our web is so much more interesting, so much less dominated by
commercialism and arrogance and foonity.
We do it because we love it, and we love it because we know it's
endlessly amazing.
File -> Open -> New Tab.