Last year when I just fully started luxuriating in the comfort the internet gives, a friend replied to what I said was unusual to my previous birthdays; as the instantaneity and responsiveness of the other world. When I asked him to explain better, he quipped the other world to be the one we live in with constant keystrokes and fondles of touch-pads that translate our expressions, emotions and sighs on screens that give us the halogen glare, the only world that exists in the interconnectivity of webs.
What was really strange about the birthday I had last year wasn't in the pomp and wines or in the gifts and greetings from families and loved ones around. It was, to my consternation, how the internet related with me in the fashion I never submitted my imagination to. The way fellow cyber-citizens gave minuscule of their time in making my birthday memorable with wall messages, season's comments on Blogger™ and mentions in blog posts. I could count about four to five experiences that got me eternally hooked to the internet.
First, it was sometimes in my JSS days when a friend of mine started missing library sections after school hours for what he called a shop with monstrosity of miserable wire connections snaking through and out from indistinguishable interfaces. My friend would come the next day to the class bearing tales of worlds that we couldn't staples senses from. He would strut to every desk in the class thumping his feet hard on the floor and drawing invisible lines on our lockers to illustrate his many stories that were only passed to us in senseless definitions. We knew the shop he constantly patronized was with computers, exactly like the desktops we had in our comp-lab in school. But what we couldn't fathom was how the world could constantly turn at every click of the mouse and punch on the keyboard. My friend shared stories of numerous cartoon pictures he had seen, free greeting cards he had sent from 2000GreetingCards and a virtual address box he now has which allowed people all over the globe to contact him without charges. That started my initiation. The second to the fourth experiences were just gnarled metamorphoses of a long indulged activity. Often, activities that never added anything to morality, other than torrid vagaries that made our jaws dropped at things we would never be allowed to see under supervision.
The last in the panoply of events that I most recall vividly and recount graphically was the day Google™ outsmarted my teacher in his wits. It was until that first triumph of Google™ in my class that I started seeing farther beyond my textbooks with patches of drools from my long nights of reading and cramming.
Mr Olawale thought he was the subject he was taking us himself. He swam in it in the class, talked to us in its jargons and even reprimanded us in the argots that left us befuddled and more sorrowful than what wrong we had committed. He taught us Literature in SS1. He would tell anyone who went astray, 'The metonymy of your traits is a paradox to the irony of the metaphor of your villainy'. Imagine the inane! What sense is there to make from that!? Rubbish! But the day Opeyemi told him there were more than 12 figures of speech in Literature and that Erotema could also mean Rhetorical Question, the condescension he always wore in his display of erudite abilities was squalled by the inferiority that made him twinkle and furrow his temple as he mouthed the world again to see if it was some jumble or Greek. Later that day, after we had contributed five naira each, Opeyemi showed us how Google™ does provide answers to everything, even to the names of our villages.
If you are still contemplating on the importance of this cyber-world to me, it means you have not read the previous paragraphs meticulously. I'm so attached to this world that I wish I were born into it. In the era that I was born some decades ago, cellular was novel and fax was an exclusive advancement. I usually thought; if the internet wasn't here in this present age, what would I have directed my restlessness into? Perhaps, my boredom would have been thicker that it would take only a sword to slice apart. With my modem tucked into the port they call USB interface, I didn't rumble with unknown gripes whenever no one seemed to be singing my tunes at home. I didn't murmur, I simply engaged friends that only I could talk to with flurry moves of my finger points. No one called this hallucination at home because though my friends were only virtual elements on my screen, they were real in their own world behind their own screens. I chuckled when it was mischief going on, I jeered when Punch and SaharaReporters uncovered political grafts.
Amidst these moments that made me febrile, different thoughts that coalesced in my mind have always claimed my effervescence. The ifs of my nightmares I tagged them. What if a deadly virus powerful than any anti malware were released in the cyberspace and the server of every site shut down to its power? What if rapture happened and the only thing it took from the earth are not humans but computers and data-cards? What if Microsoft and Mac stopped software production and HP and the others were left to the gadget making alone, what computer would we be having then? What if my parents thought of a better way of punishing me other than the usual empty disownment and my small HP notebook was smashed on the wall, would I ever be whole anymore?
As I blow candles off my birthday cake, I would make these wishes alone: that computer users soon balloon to the statistic of the numbers of phone subscribers we have around today; that internet becomes like the 'PHCN' poles on our streets that we could plug into with little pay (Talk of accessibility then); that the internet evolves into a radio we can tune into with frequencies as the websites and voices in place of written words; that the only amount my internet provider charges me for monthly subscription is a little above #500 for unlimited data allowance.
This world has been good. I do not want to leave it so soon. It's been some years now, but see how better my life has become. Has your life been better too?
I'm a child of both worlds… Which world do you love most?
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My DOB: 17th of June.
