subject: Get Off The Beaten Path [print this page] Most of us don't spend time online exploring new sites. We spend our time exploring inside Web sites that we are already familiar with. In fact, most people visit the same sites every day, and often we visit them in the same sequence. Our knowledge of the ways in which the Internet has been changing come from our experience of those sites, not from a larger survey of the Web. But with a much richer world of experience available, now is the time to step outside of our regular habits to find something new. It might be free online girl games for a young relative. It might be discovering a culture we never knew existed through the eyes of a stranger.
During the early years of the Internet, it was very much a product of the West. Those first simple pages we all viewed on our slow dialup connections we like the first houses in an idyllic new town. There was diversity, but it was diversity within a reasonably homogenous framework. Everything was in English. Almost everything was created by and catered to Western tastes and sensibilities.
As time passed and the Internet grew, that small town began to look more and more like a city. The arrival of pornography to the Internet caused huge expansion, but it also created a red light district right through all the neighborhoods. We became more aware of computer viruses. We heard horror stories about identity theft. Maybe we even experienced it. The bigger it grew, the more dangerous the Internet seemed to be.
Because of its dangers, many people began to do less and less exploring, in much the same way that people do when a real small town grows into a real big city. We kept visiting our favorite sites. We kept using our e-mail and reading the news. We kept doing research. But we stopped looking to the left or the right; we became city folk, staying within our comfort zones instead of venturing out into a potentially dangerous unknown.
However, as that city has grown it has become incredibly diverse. There may be criminals in the alleys, but there's also sculpture in the squares. Outside of the narrow path that we feel comfortable on, there are endless opportunities to be inspired, amazed, entertained, educated, and confronted by a world much bigger and more interesting than the one we may inhabit.
The fundamental force behind this evolution isn't technology. It's multiculturalism, which can remain largely invisible to a Western user who still only visits English language pages and whose social media experience is sheltered by a friend network of Western English speakers. Beyond that experience, the Internet belongs to the world, and the world is truly there to experience.
It is true that there is safety in habit. The less adventuring we do online, the less likely it is that we'll give our personal information to the wrong person or accidentally pick up a computer virus.
But when the world is calling, we should answer even if there are risks. We should spend some time exploring. We should break out of our habits. We should see what there is beyond the sites we're already familiar with. If we have a young niece, she might like free online girl games. If we're planning to travel, we might like to visit the exotic place we get to know first by traveling the Web.
