Pack Animal

In 1996 I was quitting my job in a big corporation. I had given my work to others, attended my going away luncheon party, and threw up in the bathroom because by quitting a lucrative and stable gig I was basically stepping off a cliff with only my wits as a safety net. Still, I had a few hours to kill before I could leave and I logged onto the internet, which was just gearing up, to see what was the what. I sent some intra-office joke emails for fun, then went to the big world wide net and keyed in the name of my very famous huge company.  One lone article came up. I keyed in "Elvis Presley", "The Rolling Stones," the "Beatles." Nothing. The internet, I thought, was a bust. The Boston Public Library had access, so I eventually went there if I wanted something.  Long lines for the ten computers. You had to stand to use it for your ten minutes, your back to the line waiting so everyone could see what you were looking at.  Stellar memory: a homeless man--complete with holes in his shoes--spent his precious ten looking at gay porn.  A woman in line squawked to the librarian that her children were watching. But the librarian, older woman with grey tight curls, pink sweater and sensible shoes stood her ground: the man could look at anything he wanted and if the woman had a problem, take her kid out of the library. I cheered. First salvo for net democracy.  I remember thinking when I was 10 years old that wouldn't it be great if we could access all the information in the world in our hand? A la Star Trek.. Now that we can, it seems like Pandora's box. Remember when Wikipedia first came out? I was teaching college at the time and I wouldn't let my students use Wikipedia as a reference. The Encyclopedia Britannica if you please. How could the validation of information be democratic? How can you have an opinion about facts? Granted, my blue collar background made me a little happy that experts were getting a comeuppance of sorts. And by this time I had felt the sting of critics. But the fickleness of crowd sourced knowledge left me breathless. Anyone could add or delete any information from an entry. Anyone. I only did it once and that was after Seung-Hui Cho shot up Virginia Tech. No one knew who the shooter was at first and I thought, "please don't let him be a Slav" because I remembered the shame of the Unabomber being Polish.  Other people told me the same thing: "Please don't let him be Italian, gay, Jewish, Black..." whatever your tribe, please God. Let him be something else. As soon as we found out who the shooter was, something made me go to Wikipedia and look up Korean-American and sure enough within 15 minutes someone had added Seung-Hui Cho as a famous Korean American and I took it out. By now I'm sure someone put it back in...the viciousness of the pack, but I don't have the heart to look.