Thursday Thirteen #5: The Innovation Superhighway

I'm without my trusty laptop until the AC adaptor can be replaced with the kindly assistance of the tax return sometime around the first of the month, so I needed a fairly simple topic for TT that I could bang out quickly on a friend's computer. I got to thinking about some of the ways that the information superhighway has bettered my life, and came up with the requisite thirteen improvements.

1. It's provided me with virtual travel opportunities. I've physically visited eight states during the course of my lifetime, but have friends or friendly acquaintances in eighteen states and the United Kingdom. If you count our UK scholar's home state of New York, it's nineteen states. The North Carolina friend was actually on an extended missions trip to Japan when we started to correspond, but she's been a stateside pastor for awhile now (and recently married--congrats again, Joe and Pastor Parato, if you're reading!)

2. These far-flung contacts built my confidence, since this bunch thinks I'm pretty cool. It gave me a foundation to develop more friendships with people that I could see!

3. It's sometimes easier to reach the busy local friends by e-mail than it is by phone. E-mail also doesn't cost three dollars a gallon to transport.

4. I've written a lot of confessional passages that have taught me some things about myself that I hadn't allowed to surface. It seems to be easier without a face there.

5. We used to spend all kinds of time wondering what our "ministry calling" was years ago. I found out what mine was through a combination of all of the things that I just said--finding people who asked my opinion and helped me to develop confidence as I fielded prayer requests, provided encouragement, and taught on prayer or the subject at hand from the scriptures as the situation may have warranted.

6. When you're up in the Midwest at 1 AM thinking troubled thoughts, West Coast friends are just getting warmed up for an evening online. I have one that's particularly good at showing up and talking about anything and everything to fill the void and restore tranquility.

7. I love research, and I can do more quicker with less clutter by just Googling whatever topic inspires burning questions.

8. I've used my experiences online as a message board member and moderator as references on applications that show that I have marketable skills related to the Internet.

9. Prospective writers have a number of places to publicly display their latest works. If you're brave enough to start trying to sell them after some positive feedback, you can always register with a site like Helium.com.

10. Another expression of artistic sensibility you can develop online, if you're good at visualizing images related to an idea and manipulating the applicable tools, are computer graphics using various programs and languages like HTML, CSS, etc.

11. You can get a lot of news from various sources, including your friends' forwards of the latest alarming information that they received. If it looks a little too farfetched, you can always go check out how verifiable the information has been found to be on Snopes.com.

12. When the news gets on your nerves, you can get a greater variety of radio stations than are probably available for you locally (or that seems to be the case in the rural Midwest, by a large margin), as well as webcasts of topics that may not interest enough of the masses to end up on plain ol' TV. Some of them are on plain ol' satellite stations, but I don't have access to those right now.

13. I will have to doff my cap at this point to Blogger, where it's possible to pull together several of these experiences at the same time--posting original writing, modifying the layout, and communicating with folk far and near that you may not have otherwise ever gotten to meet.

Next week's TT will be some other expeditious topic, and then maybe we'll be back to exciting layouts with photos that take hours to dream up and assemble. Happy TT!