Internet Connection
By: Obie Usategui
8/26/2025

So, for a change, today, believe it or not, I am not writing anything on politics, everything is so good, and the bad is not worth talking about. The topic I chose for today, instead is one that has really fascinated me for many years – one that, whether we like it or not, has really influenced our lives over the past 60 years, which I hate to admit as it is a dead giveaway on how old I am.

The topic I am talking about is the none other than “the internet.” While many of us have been spoiled enough to take it for granted sometimes, the fact is that the worldwide computer network via the World Wide Web has changed our lives in ways we do not even realize or care to understand.

The other day, I came to think, how the internet has made it possible for even the less adept amongst us to have access to anything and everything your heart desires. Whether it is healthcare, goods and services, technologies, history; whether you want a recipe for cooking a nice meal, or whether you need a difficult component for your car, or whether you want to buy something out of the comfort of your home, all of it can be done by just clicking some keys on your laptop and/or your smartphone. Amazing, isn’t it?

I personally am so, so spoiled that, nowadays, with everything I buy, I do it on the net. Like if you buy on Amazon, amazingly, you can have items delivered to you the next day, so what is the use of burning gas and going through the trouble of going to a store. Has the internet made us lazier? Yes, it has. I would rather call it convenient though.

I remember back in the day before computers came of age, where accessing information was limited, sometimes as limited as using Encyclopedias as our main source of knowledge, thus their popularity as a favorite gift of parents to their children. Then again, I really do not think many of us really used Encyclopedias for their intended purpose. Bottom line, our intellectual growth was, if you think about it, limited to whatever we learned at school. What the internet did was a phenomenon that wove the fabrics of our daily lives with a universe previously out of our reach.

For better or worse, the internet has given everyone an open platform to be used in countless productive ways; the speed of fiber optics has transformed how much we know, how we learn, how we work. It has revolutionized the world of commerce, education, entertainment, to name a few. In short, the internet has really become the heartbeat of moder civilization. There are many who were born in the computer age and cannot tell the difference as much as those of us who were part of the world before computers.

I remember early in my college days back in the 1960’s when there was a general fear of computers, remember? To some, back in the day, computers were a threat as they were going to take over the world of humans. Instead, computers and the internet just paved the way for a marvelous development of humanity, opening the gates and allowing us to expose ourselves to all kinds of wonders which would have been impossible to access otherwise. History, as you know, is replete with tales of humanity resisting change; to resisting everything that is new to them thus creating subliminal and/or conscious fear.

When cars replaced horses, when electricity substituted candlelight each technological leap forward was met with some rebellion and opposition, much like what we are going through today with Artificial Intelligence [AI].

Mind you, I would be the first to admit that, at first, I looked upon AI, with a certain level of skepticism, the one typical to resisting that which is new to us. But I got to tell you, I have used AI in several ways already and simply said, it is magnificent. AI will, like the internet before, open still another new world of technological advancement and I am certain that in a few years from now, humanity, as we did with the internet, will wonder how we could ever have lived without it.

Anyways, I just thought I share with you some of my feeling about this amazing tool we call the internet – one that every day allows us to flourish and prosper in ways we never thought possible.