The Internet is Ubiquitous – or was that a glitch?

Microsoft is corrupted.

For the third time on our nine month journey, our computer is dead. On a blue screen it screams, “your computer has been corrupted – please restart in ‘Safe Mode’”. Travel with a computer has become, for us, common place.

We left New Orleans in early December with a less than one kilo netbook. It has performed flawlessly and been heavily abused. It’s one drawback, though, is that it keeps allowing Microsoft to corrupt it. When corruption occurs, I think of it as the computer’s gone for vacation. The computer is still there. Its office space is occupied. But when you try to contact it you get this passive blue screen – a sort of ‘I will be out of the office until September 2nd – please try and contact me when I return,’ type message.

So, our computer is corrupted. Thinking about our current computer problem leads us to feeling that we are letting down our blog. We love our blog. It is a part of our promise of service and exchange between home and abroad. We have a dedicated group of readers to whom we are very grateful. Our readers give us a sense of mission, engagement beyond our common surrounds, contact with home, and exchange. We do not mean to let you down.

When at first the computer goes on vacation, we enter into a revolving conversation. I always defend the internet. When we were in developing countries I would throw up my hands, “Let’s just give away the computer here and be done with it.” My latest response in Bretagne, France was different, “We are close enough to home; let’s just carry it around broken until we get back.” I look at computers as apparati of planned obsolescence. Computers are disposable. They are meant to be treated this way. I don’t like it. I don’t appreciate it. But, it is a fact.

My wife, coblogger, and traveling companion has a much younger and healthier opinion and usefulness for a broken down compute;. “It is not the computer that is malfunctioning; it is Microsoft,” she will tell me. All we need is a reasonable techie in an internet café and we can reinstall Windows. A simple fix. Of course, she is right.

We have had our computer put back together from Mumbai to rural Turkey. Our computer has recovered from two previous complete meltdown, several close calls, Chinese worms, spyware invaders, reckless luggage handlers, overnight bus rides under foot and much worse… So, it seems obvious enough that now that we are back in the West; now that we are back in the birthplace of western civilization; now that we are in the country of all things cosmopolitan and worthwhile for consumption (France); it would be easy for us to find techies and internet. In Mumbai, when the precious blogs on our ‘desktop’ had not been properly backed up to the hard drive, our lovely techie buddies did the equivalent of open heart triple bypass surgery to our computer. Not really being surgeons; but having our full faith; they got their 10 minute surgery education from YouTube. The surgeons downloaded a video of cutting apart and putting back together our exact victim and then for the course of two hours played Dr Jeckyl and gave rebirth to our traveling Mr Hyde.

This of course brings me to our point: We need the internet to publish. We need the internet to travel (our itineraries, maps, contacts etc reside in email or other forms). So it is important that the internet remains ubiquitous. It does not.

When the internet quits working our Marco Polo lifestyle collapses. For those of us who begin travel from a computer savvy country, we may have to accept changes in our technological world view. At the beginning of our trip I imagined the world was broken into two classes of internet use.

My internet worldview was developed between my experiences in the United States and Latin America. I believed that there was either a culture of computers (with wifi flowing freely from every house and business), or, there were internet cafes in every neighborhood where single available twentysomethings teenage facebook fans, tiny video game addicts, and midlife male losers met like a small community to laugh about or hide behind computer terminals under whirling fans. I believed that the internet was ubiquitous. As it turns out, internet and computer culture changes as dramatically from country to country as language. In what I thought would be the most computer savvy countries t visit (China and Japan where computers are pioneered and built) there was not the public I.T. culture I had assumed.

Early readers may remember us bemoaning the ‘Great Firewall of China’ which kept us blocked from such important web communities as Facebook, Google, and YouTube. In Ethiopia, internet had really only arrived in the capital (Addis Ababa); the rest of the country waited for periodic signals and power to be turned back on. In Ghana and West Africa, there was internet as I had known it in South America, existing in small internet cafes. However, they were so completely local we needed guides to find them.

Each country, it turns out, has a unique relationship to computers. In Turkey, wifi was everywhere. However, the country was struck by some great paranoia (so that while wifi comes streaming from every possible nook and cranny, none of it was accessible). A grand conspiracy to sneak in and destroy your computer, your home life, and probably your fridge and TV caused streaming paranoia. In three weeks in Turkey, we never came across an open wifi signal. In Europe, there appears to be internet. I think people are using computers. But it is not a public thing.

In Paris, Madrid, or Venice, the great café culture has not been upended into becoming the great internet café culture; people leave their laptops at home and still enjoy old fashioned conversation.

As for our blog, we are going to work hard to find internet. If we can find a sprightly twenty-something techie we will beg them to help us reinstall our windows and return our tiny netbook from its extended vacation. Until then, we will seek out internet hotspots and wifi cafes, borrow beg and steal our friends and others computers, and publish, where ever possible, our blogs.

Our computer is corrupted. This means, you can expect fewer blog postings for a while.

The Internet is Ubiquitous – or was that a glitch?