Contemplations on life and the internet...

Last night, as I had trouble falling asleep after the exciting CFL Western Final (see other entries on this below), I pondered why I spend a lot of time on the Internet. I realized that a lot of it is because I like to read, and obviously the Internet supplies an endless source of reading material. (I also have a ton of books on various topics that I'm currently reading or mean to read soon - from triathlon training, to the 2005 Tour de France, to Music Therapy, to stress management, to "In Praise of Slow", to "Why French Women Don't Get Fat" ... maybe I should put up a reading list on the sidebar...)

In a broader sense, I guess it reflects a desire to learn more about the world, from different perspectives.

I then realized that my internet activities are likely the logical follow-through on my prior hobby of radio. I think I was probably about 10 years old, living in Vancouver, when I discovered that my AM radio could actually pick up radio stations from other cities - Victoria, Kelowna, even Seattle. With more practice and experience, I learned the best times to listen and how to adjust my antenna to pick up even further stations. I then branched out into shortwave radio listening as well ... many an afternoon spent listening through a ton of static, trying to pick up a station ID from a signal that I suspected was a rare or exotic find, only to discover it was something common (BBC/VOA/Radio Canada International etc.) in a different language. I also enjoyed listening to newscasts from different countries - I thought it was fascinating that the BBC had different news stories than the local media (my first introduction to media bias, I guess). And one of the highlights was when I could actually hear an internationally significant event take place on radio - like when I listened to Radio Vilnius at the time when the Lithuanians were rebelling against the Soviets, and their radio station was broadcasting from a secret exile location.

Anyway, I guess my interest in hearing news from other sources and learning more about the world has transferred from radio as a source to the internet. And probably it's the same sort of fascination at learning about things that caused me difficulty and frustration in a full-time family practice medicine situation - I'd love to talk at length with a number of my former patients, hear their perspective on a variety of things (including their health), but fee-for-service universal healthcare in Canada doesn't really allow for that (or at least I would have been chased out of my clinic for not making enough money/seeing enough patients, rather than voluntarily leaving).

So now I regularly read a number of news sites, blogs (see sidebar), and Google News to keep up-to-date on topics that interest me. It's useful having somewhere to share information when I find something interesting, so I guess that's partly the purpose of this blog (and the Daily Peloton forums).

(and I guess the whole point of this exercise was to justify to myself the amount of time I spending surfing the Internet... no, I mean reading about world events and other interesting topics).