PLAYING GOD AND TAKING 'CRAP DETECTION 101' AT THE SAME TIME

I'm taking a wild guess here....

Waking up with a headache or a backache is all too common, right? Two more reasons Americans last year filled 254 million prescriptions for pain killing drugs like OxyContin and Percoset. That's enough to medicate every American adult around the clock for an entire month.

Lot of pain out there. Living itself can be painful. But it wasn't supposed to be this way. As we evolved from out of our harsh pre-historic past and devised all sorts of physical conveniences, wasn't humanity supposed to live better? Trouble is, most of these convenience were for the body, not the mind or the spirit. And so while we can always air condition ourselves in the middle of a blazing desert, we still can't always condition ourselves in the middle of a blazing crisis.

Enter the Internet.

An extraordinary instrument that allows us to reach out almost infinitely into time and space. I use it. You use it. It's connecting our minds and hearts, dreams and fears, joys and pains. There isn't a newspaper, TV commercial, or highway billboard that isn't preaching the latest generations.

So does the Internet perhaps represent humanity's highest rung on the ladder of progress? Well, in
some ways, yeah. Think of it this way. Being on the Net is something like being God: You're present virtually anywhere and everywhere you wish to be!

But just when you think you've got a good thing going, some spoil-sport critics crowd your act. Researchers from Cornell have concluded there may be a negative corollary between the number of "friends" we have on the Net and in real life. They surveyed 2000 adults and found: "On average they had only two friends with whom they could discuss important matters, down from three in 1985. Nearly half listed only one friend;4% said they had none."

Study author Matthew Bearshears: "While we appear to be just as social as ever, our friendships seem to be shallower, leaving us with fewer people we can call on to lend us money, give us a place to stay, or simply keep us company during a tough time."

Adding Internet insult to injury, other researchers now report the great god Google isn't all it's cracked up to be. What...? I use it all the time...! Aha, but they say we use it carelessly. When these sociologists tested college students they found: "Students didn't bother to assess the credibility of the information found online. For example, what if that Google profile on Martin Luther King was actually posted by a white supremacist? Googlers need to take a course in crap detection 101."

Damn, and just when I finally found all the right keys and thought I had a good thing going here...!