My Virtual Auto-Biography

The story of my life with computers and the internet goes back to Klamath Falls, Oregon, Pelican Elementary School and a number of primitive educational games such as “number munchers” and “the Oregon Trail.” When playing, you could hear the insides of these early computers zooming and cranking to animate a small green-dotted buffalo running across the prairie shot at by a hungry tender-foot named SEAN, who would need to purchase more ammunition and a spare wagon-wheel at the next fort... which would also be composed of countless lime-green dots.

These space-age machines aroused the interest not only of us students but of 4th grade teacher Dave Wehr, who developed an experimental teaching program which prominently included computers. I believe it was through the donations of generous citizens that our class acquired numerous cutting-edge computers, which were soon capable of much of the productive research and communication the web is good for today.

For example, I remember researching and writing a report on Mars. I learned that scientists believed humans might someday build colonies there, and saw images of the bizarre red terrain. As I'd been taught, I copied the images, and soon printed them out as part of a report full of solid data and augmented by my own youthful opinions and poetry. I was hooked.

By high-school, I was using the internet to communicate with friends in Ashland and Sweden, and to keep tabs on my stock-market losses. At this age I was something of a loner, and found a thrill in honing my computer skills from ninja-fast typing to researching any author or rock-star that had caught my imagination.

I also used it to find, research and win a couple of essay contests, which led to my being invited to write on teen issues and events for this very newspaper. In this job, I found the net very useful for tying what was happening at our school to teen trends and news across the country, or even the world.

As today, the sheer diversity of info sources and web communities made it possible to find info on previously unreachable and obscure topics, and to compare numerous sources to deduce what the truth on a particular subject was. For example, by reading pros and cons from numerous sources, I came to the conclusion that O.J. Simpson was probably guilty, and that the bacteria on the famous ALH84001 Mars rock was proof of bacterial life on Mars... despite its rejection by much of the scientific establishment and the government.

The first question probably could have been settled by traditional media, but the internet was necessary for the pro-alien community to get out its evidence and views against a strongly-voiced official rejection that may have come more from political and “philosophical” causes than scientific ones. The question is still open and the web is still full of arguments on both sides, but NASA has surrendered to the rogue scientists and their web-sites, proclaiming that the meteorite: “contains strong evidence that life may have existed on ancient Mars.”

It may not be terribly important whether bacteria thrived on Mars 17 million years ago, but the very same dynamics make the web a world-changer in reality and not just in hype. Traditionally, most information came from official sources such as publishing houses, magazines, and TV networks. However uncensored our society was compared to China or Cuba, censorship was still very much a part of the process that brought info and news to the public.

Networks and magazines avoided shocking and controversial stories for fear of losing advertisers, and publishing houses hardly wanted a prominent place in the extensive F.B.I. files kept on people and organizations that were deemed dangerous for more and less legitimate reasons. Today, controversial evidence, opinions, and videos can be shared with vast web communities by people who remain anonymous, and even the host web-sites are hard to censor because unlike a magazine or a publishing house, they don't necessarily have major business interests or a great stake in the established order or society.

In my opinion, the internet will forever make censorship far more difficult, even or especially in places like China and North Korea. It empowers private communication and conversation, weakening dependence on official, easily censored and controlled sources.

However, even the best societies often have important reasons to restrict certain information. A Swedish organization called WikiLeaks has in the past years accepted information from anonymous insiders and publicized for the whole world massive amounts of sensitive data about our military's strategies, equipment, and operations in the 2nd Iraqi War(according to the F.B.I.) They've released a lot of info on other diverse subjects that may be positive, but they also put our brave soldiers and defenders in unnecessary danger. It's unknown if our enemies actually used WikiLeaks but if they did, they'd have found the data quite useful. Some sort of international cooperation is needed to curb these sorts of abuses.

To get back to my story, I went on to study English first at O.I.T. and then at Southern Oregon University. I took to writing rather wild tales and poems and, being rejected by a few university lit mags, took to publishing my work free on a number of non-commercial, literary web-sites. This generated so much readership and commentary that I rarely bothered with conventional magazines after that. On just one literary e-community, http://www.abctales.com/user/seannelson , I've now had 299,734 reads.

After graduating from college, I taught English for a year at a university in rural Thailand. I had many adventures there which I shared in “mass e-mails” to my many American friends and colleagues. Surrounded by rice farms worked by water-buffalo, jungles full of elephants and tigers, and no tourists, I wrote tales, letters, and poems that were read by friends in England and Oregon, ex-professors at O.I.T. and S.O.U., and many diverse citizens of WebTopia that were interested in the civilization or wildness of Phetchaburi Province, Thailand.

In the three years since my return for health reasons, I've done many things and learned and wrote about many subjects: philosophical, political, and trivial. I listen to free lectures from Oxford University at: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/ I listen to Mozart, Robert Frost, or classical Thai village music on youtube.com I keep in close touch with many K.U. classmates on Facebook; For example, class president Jimmy Addison took a motorcycle voyage across America, updating us frequently before settling down in Seattle. Max Crismon, now a family man back from the war in Iraq, is getting ready for the opening weekend of fishing. And my old friend Amanda Shipman, now Amanda Graham, is “joining the four-eyes club,” i.e. getting glasses. I wear them, too, and I'll tell her that, and compliment hers when she posts a picture. Then Jimmy or Max might join the discussion, and who knows where it'll go from there.

The “information super-highway” can go about anywhere. That's its upside and its downside. Me, I see more of the up.