At the end of the day do your activities really matter one whit to anyone else using it? I suppose it depends on what you use the Internet for. If you're just your everyday casual surfer I'm willing to bet you don't give the Net much thought once you've logged off. you get online, you pay your bills, maybe do a little shopping, check your bank balance, log off and go run a marathon or something.
If you spend more time than that online - say as a researcher, you may spend your time within various search engines, reading articles, printing information, emailing people - not a whole lot of interaction and I would think you see the Net as just another tool that allows you to do your job.

Perhaps you've just discovered other aspects of the net that appeal to you. You stumble onto some chatroom and a greeted by friendly people and suddenly you're spending every waking minute within that little world. To you, I bet the Internet is important to you. I'd go so far as to say it's a vital link. Perhaps your shy in real life and it's hard for you to make friends. Interacting online dehumanizes you in a way. It allows you more freedom to speak in a manner you normally wouldn't in the real world - but it takes away others ability to see you and judge you. To them you're basically some text on a screen. And eventually you discover it's much easier to hurt text on a screen.

Of course you can strike up friendships and even romances that basically begin as that text on a screen, I don't deny it. I have a lot of wonderful mates online that I've never met and that I trust wholeheartedly. Some of those friends met online and are now married with three kids. It can work. But I'm straying from my topic and what I asked was 'Does the Internet matter?'. It can, on personal levels. But when you step back and look at the big picture, no. Not really.

Does it matter to the millions of people online that a few disgruntled people wish to bring down a band site/forums as mentioned in another blog? No, not really. Does it matter to anyone involved in that silly thing that several years ago some different disgruntled users tried to bring down my favourite chatroom in much the same manner? Nope. No one but the older users of TCZ even know about that, and did any of the TCZ 'Admin Wars' (as it was so humourously satirized - here and here.) cause one ripple in the great Internet society? No. At the end of the day it's just a chatroom. At the end of the day, it's just a forum. The only people that it affects are those who let it affect them - both IRL and IVL (In Virtual Reality). It might interest you to know that the person who caused the Admin Wars of TCZ, an ex-administrator of the game, failed University, suffers stress-related health problems, lost all of his close friends and his girlfriend, and has ended up the butt of a lot of jokes I'm afraid. He's very bitter, very lonely and very sad. He comes back to TCZ now and then after spending years trying to start a rival chatroom that failed, and hacking us etc. People talk to him. I talk to him. But mostly I feel sorry for him. His hatred for TCZ and the imaginary accusations he came up with just took over his life. So I guess you could say the Internet mattered to him, But again, in the grand scheme of things, no one else on the Internet really cared. And it was stupid of him to let it affect his life like that - sorry Greg but it's true.

Who knows :) At least she won't grow up afraid of the computer like I did. I never used one for anything but games before I went to college. The thought of using them or even learning *how* to use them for anything else was far too daunting. Ironic that I ended up with a job requiring me to be on one all the time eh? Ah life, such a twisted, bizarre little thing.

So I didn't touch Pagemaker yesterday, basically because I haven't really been given any work to do yet so I felt guilty about charging the hospital for time spent just looking at the program. Hopefully this week I'll be bombarded with brochures to create and I'll end up with loads of cash just falling out of my pockets :) hehehe.

I've been checking out my city's newspaper forums online lately. Usually I just lurk, but I decided to take a more active role on there and try and get the people there to use all of it. They gave everyone forums to talk about TV, movies and music and no one was using them. Why? Because they spend all their time bitching about illegal immigrants and how they're 'taking jobs away from english-speaking Americans. It does my head in. I got some of them to talk about the Osbournes though :)