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One megabyte at a time: Hello, my name is Elsie and I’m addicted to the Internet

Saturday June 25 2016

Hello. My name is Elsie and I am in Internet addict. If I go for more than 24 hours without using the World Wide Web I start to experience withdrawal symptoms that include irritability, an inability to focus on Real Life and an irresistible craving for the Google search engine.

When things get acute, I will do demeaning things for a taste of a connection – including using filthy, filthy dial-up. I have been known to frequent establishments that offer free Wi-Fi with distressing regularity.

You can spot Wi-Flies like me by the multiple electronic devices crowding their cafe table, and their ferocious territoriality with regards to electrical outlets.

Most of us are freelancers and consultants, jobs that are very-high risk for Internet abuse due to the unstable nature of office space and structured days in the industries. I am part of Generation Online, eldest of the Millennial Wave and ICT is not just a part of my life, it is a necessity.

I am sharing this in case you know other people in this predicament. Perhaps you yourself are in the same situation. Your habit is causing friction with friends and family from the generation that remembers conversations uninterrupted by the siren call of Candy Crush or WhatsApp notifications.

You can’t remember the last time you got your news from a physical newspaper, and probably don’t appreciate the distinct experiences afforded by Encyclopaedia Britannica versus Wikipedia.

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You have way over 300 good buddies, 90 per cent of whom you have never met and never will, trusting the relationships mediated for you by Facebook or Twitter. Let’s not even discuss what the Internet has done for and to your, er, private life.

Or, wait. Maybe we should? Not your private life, you pervert. Let’s browse your cyberlife with the “safe” setting on. Specifically, the issues of security and privacy and criminality.

Do you have your finger on the touchscreen there, is your online environment as secure as a 14-character password with at least one number and one symbol in it? Do you get the feeling, somebody’s watching you... through your in-built camera? Well you should.

George Orwell, one of our father prophets of modern dystopia, wrote about this in some detail in his scripture titled 1984. Of course, like any prophetic work, it was stunningly prescient yet limited in its scope and ability to go into detail about the realities of a Big Brother state mentality. It doesn’t talk about, for example, the corporate empires of information and technology or the governance wars that have just begun and that affect us all in alarming ways.

To bring this closer to home: Earlier this week, a man was charged for insulting the President of Tanzania, John Pombe Magufuli. To wit, he did so on an online platform that has long been trusted for its alleged impenetrability to surveillance.

This man was charged through the use of the Cyber Crimes Act of 2015, Our Year of the Elections. State censorship has found a way to insert itself into the wilderness of the online jungle. And there is more: The nation has just made the switch to genuine (and traceable) mobile phones through the expedient of disabling phones with illegal IMEI numbers.

Furthermore, the exercise to register all Simcards has been ongoing for the past few years, although this is complicated slightly by the fact that mobile companies generally side with their clients on how brief, easy and unintrusive this should be. Do you see the emergent pattern?

What’s that? War, you ask? Surely this is an overstatement? No, no it isn’t. The beauty of modern life is that it has allowed us to evolve conflict to sophisticated and non-physical realms.

Wars of information and control are not going to be fought with barbaric, testosterone-addled methods. Nobody brings a knobkerrie to a Freedom of Information Bill consultation meeting, punishments are hardly doled out by way of caning anymore.

This relative lack of blood makes it hard to sense that we are all of us in the middle of a bitter conflict. The balance of power between citizens and states, between consumers and corporations, security and crime is being viciously contested every moment of every day because Information is Power and we live in the Information Age.

Yet how many of us grasp the implications? Tune in next week for more of this Internet addict’s tirade on net neutrality, intellectual property rights, government surveillance, other things she has a tenuous grasp of and perhaps even a bit of conspiracy theory.

Elsie Eyakuze is an independent consultant and blogger for The Mikocheni Report, http://mikochenireport.blogspot.com. E-mail: [email protected]

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