Internet, personal history, and present dilemma!

Hi All, 

I don't think I will be able to join the first half of my class because of my defense. Here is what I thought and ruminated about the Free Culture text. In this post, I want to share as well as think about the shaping of culture in the social media sphere. Since this is a blog-post, I move back and forth between personal narrative of interaction with the internet, go back and forth from past to present. 

As I scroll my instagram, I consume many small videos ranging from the cute pugs to crazy nail art, to the news and information about Priyanka Chopra and Nick Jonas or Harry and Megan or just information about many cat pets of my friends. 

I go back to my memory lane, where I learned MS-DOS and the joy of writing our name with command and seeing on a black and white computer screen. I must have been in my fifth grade and the privilege of going to a boarding (private) school was you had a computer class where you learned everything about computer for four days and go to the lab and practice MS-DOS. 

Computers were part of growing privileged educational culture then. I remember my father who is a lover of technology bought a used computer to set it up at home and also connected it to the Dial-up internet where we used to have a certain password and then our phone bill would come expensive and with that fear we connected and disconnected it really fast. It was also the time of various kinds of chat room like penpal.com and otherwise. My father decided to learn how to use the internet because he wanted to learn and he was someone who got fascinated with the internet. I remember him recalling that he went to cyber cafe in Kathmandu this should be around 17-18 years ago and then paying the one-hour internet price and asking the cyber cafe owner to teach him how to use the internet. That is how he created penpal account and also, he made us create our penpal accounts too. Me and my brother made friends from Turkey and South Korea - both of them sent a hand written letter and emails in my father's account. For my father, he made us type his friendship letters to women in the US. I wonder how my mother felt about it. (Fyi - Nepal is a very patriarchal society). Years before, when my mother went to learn computer with her friend, she got beaten up by my father. I wonder how many other women were in the position of my mother? 

Here is a cyber cafe image in Kathmandu that I found on google: 

You can see the old generation computers with a dollar sign and also  information that says "Burn CD"

With a lot of tourists visiting Nepal after the Maoist insurgency, the cyber cafes bloomed in Nepal and similarly, the internet culture I assume started to enter. There was a famous website called: "Nepalnews.com" where alongside the news there used to be a chat room called "Chiya Chautari" (Tea house) and a lot of time people started chatting there and meeting too and making friends there. I remember chatting to people there but I never met anyone in person from there. 

Years later, in Nepal a recent data said 100% of people in Nepal have access to mobile phones but still digital literacy is a lack. A lot of people know how to use Facebook but the actual educational part of the internet isn't accessible to a lot of people and especially those who are marginalized. So, Lessig is right - some people are left behind but those people are also affected with the Free culture. He says, there is no single inventor of the internet but it got evolved and it is still emerging and getting mixed up with a variety of cultures and geographical places and adapting to the audience's culture. Lessig further adds as the internet has been incorporated in ordinary life things have changed/ The speed at which the internet has traveled and changed the lives and cultures of people. New cultures of the internet demand new kinds of adaptability and new kinds of policies. 

The reason I am sharing this narrative is to share how the shift in technological development in Nepal and I think this kind of change is similar in different kinds of societies. 

But at present, so many things have changed- students in the US don't like to use Facebook anymore but various organizations especially NGOs and governments or anti-vaccine people like to use the Facebook because they can use it to the specific group of people to relay their information etc. Each medium of communication has each unique culture that it upholds and shares I think and it is crazy to think that our information is so free and wild and accessible on the internet. 

My questions: 

1) How do we teach the cultural boundaries of the internet in our class? 

2) How do we personally navigate and curate our own information online so that safeguards our identity, personal history, and professional lives?