#137.20 - Sunday #54: Internet Poisoning: The terrible horror of being away from each other

They are all over now

I have discovered something awful. It happened yesterday. I cracked yesterday. Yesterday I had enough. This experiment has gone on for long enough.

The teaching has been going awful. Just awful.

It needs to end. The children need to be on their holidays soon. In June.

But worse than that, I have also discovered that the way in which we have been separated from each other is insidious. We now do not get information from each other. That back and forth the good nature of exchange, that wonderful currency of being present has been taken from us and no amount of Zoom is ever going to replace it. Not seeing and being with another person is really awful. Solitary confinement is almost certainly the worst thing you could ever do to anyone. The cruelty of it.

My frustrations have come through being unable to do a proper job. Or it is not even a job - to teach properly. When you are with a child, there is banter, there are good examples and poor ones. We learn from each other. There is a toing and froing. Now there is a nothing.

There is only information and it is hard and cold and dry. There is no enlivening of the subject through the teacher. Through the warmth of the teacher. There is no feedback from the child. Just as we take care and water plants, we also do so with each other. The breakthrough moment for me came when I was thinking of how would teach Minerology - and how I would teach Geology - and I was thinking I could do this and that and I was so annoyed. That the Earth is constantly moving is something which is crazy. And now it will be delivered through graphs and not stories. It is mental.

Stories are superior to graphs because it enables the person to transmit that sense of wonder. And then I realised the conduits of that information are the ones determining how we think. The media, the internet. These are the people who are funneling our exchange - they now completely control us. We have to kick away the crutch. I am am having internet poisoning.

I was watching Memories of the Alhambra - a cleverly but very slowly - woven tale of the dangers of gaming. A world in which men have completely escaped reality and the women are the only ones which are left holding those pegs down. That it should be Korean of course makes sense. Koreans are at the thin end of that IT wedge. It is reality for them - they game relentlessly. I cannot imagine what it must be like being in a relationship with a Korean man.

I remember the first time I saw the Internet. I was in MITA and Dr Tan Tin Wee came over to show us the Internet - he showed us the White House's page. Or was I in TechNet? Anyway, it was one page. It was the first generation HTML and it was a Mozilla page. Or maybe Firefox. And I helped build the first Singapore government website. I handcoded the entire thing. And now we have this monster taking over our lives. It is not out of control.

It is really not acceptable how we have allowed it to ruin us. Fuck this.