This is going to be a totally research-free post, so if that turns you off, uh, you should probably not be on the internet.

But okay. I've been thinking about the impact of the internet on my life. In my rhetoric and composition class we read an essay that was about the (incorrect) presumption that older people have about young people on the internet. That is, kids these days never read or write voluntarily and are criminally uninformed because of it. And the author made a good point that the internet is voluntary reading and writing, much more than people were doing before blogs and wikipedia.

So, true confessions time: when I was little, I was incredibly, insanely conservative. Not just like "I'm going to be in the College Republicans [ed.: ahahahahaha] one day" but like "Homosexuality is WRONG it says so in the BIBLE LOOK AT THIS VERSE," down to actually designing t-shirts with that Leviticus verse about the mandatory stonings on them. I was scary. And I remember going over to a (rare) liberal friend's house when I was about ten, and having this discussion. And he said, "my God wouldn't support that kind of idea. That's hatred of people because of something they can't help, for something he created himself." Of course I got incredibly angry and never spoke to him again, and it never even resonated with me at all.

And then when I was fifteen, I got a computer of my very own. Of course, in the beginning I spent all my time on Myspace and various forums and chatrooms and Lord of the Rings websites. And then for some reason I started following some blog that occasionally linked to something liberal - I don't even remember what. So I sort of was exposed inadvertently to other ideas. My friends at the time were not big fans of any other ideas that our parents didn't espouse, particularly things like "it's not nice to call people fags." And then I started reading Feministing, and my mind was freaking blown. There were other people out there that might share these same exact opinions! Some people liked equality! And then I read Full-Frontal Feminism, and then Female Chauvinist Pigs, and I think we all know how this turned out: I went from full-on right-wing conservative to slightly apathetic hippie to full-on too-liberal-for-the-Democratic-party liberal.

I certainly didn't have friends that believed any of these things. Among the people from The Woodlands, that number is still pretty small. And I have to wonder if I'd even be in Austin right now if it weren't for that influence (when I was little, the idea was more along the lines of "those liberal tea-sippers in Austin have no idea of what the common man wants, blah blah, RINO, blah blah").

On the other hand, some really scary times in my life have been directly influenced by the internet, too. I wouldn't have picked up Godless if I hadn't read about it online, which started a really angry, destructive period of atheism in which I almost lost quite a lot of friends. And odds that it would've occurred to me to try to kill myself via alcohol poisoning: not high.

I'm pretty sure those things can't be blamed on the internet as an entity, though. The opening up of my mind to new ideas, yes. Exposure to those new ideas, yes. But discernment between good ideas and bad ones is something that can't be taught with parental controls or even by good role models. This sort of thing, like it or not, has to be learned through experience. Which is something the internet can certainly give.