I was recently introduced to the People’s World Peace Project. Anyone who isn’t aware of it should make their own introduction. The website is impressively presented and inviting with no strident “correctness.” It’s clearly a great resource for those wanting a peace oriented world community. I am one of those, and fully support its mission, but I doubt that I’ll find myself visiting it regularly. Because, it’s a website.

This is likely age causal, but I don’t really think so. I just know the difference between our current social media interaction and the mass communication of a previous humanity. Somehow, for me, the Internet remains tediously disappointing despite all of its gadgety contrivance. It has become an inescapable part of our social fabric, and an all too addictive convenience, but I try to live as much of my life outside of it as possible. Virtual life is just so overwhelmingly tiresome.

Online presentations of print media always look off-putting. Perhaps someday I will prefer Kindle to the warmth of the printed word. At least it mimics an actual book. I had similar resistance to embracing CDs over LPs. Of course, embrace isn’t exactly the right word when one has no choice in the matter. Like drinking out of a plastic bottle rather than a glass one, choice has now largely been removed from available possibilities.

Then again, LP’s are making a comeback. Something about their more human ambient sound is finding increasingly receptive young ears. There’s something about perusing album art that a jewel box can’t quite manage, and iTunes can’t even imagine.

I’ve also heard report that board games are regaining popularity. Real people sitting around a non-electric challenge with eye contact, and game elements handed from one to another. No need to text your activity, because your friends are present. Who would have guessed that a time machine would turn out to be so low tech?

Though there is some hope of possibly retrieving positive aspects of our pre-E existence, the floodgates of overwhelming e-connectedness will be difficult to re-close. Whatever one’s politics or personal focus, the Internet provides an endless matrix of informative proselytizing and choir preaching.

Getting people’s undivided attention is the difficulty. The trouble with so many choices is that they are mostly selected destination points, not unexpected enticing encounters like a chance article in a general interest magazine or newspaper, or something tripped upon while channel surfing. All the availability in the world means little if availing it never happens. Oddly, I somehow find a limited cable package actually preferable to the frustration of countless disappointing programs I don’t have the energy to explore. Making the decision that there isn’t anything worth watching then arrives so much more quickly.

There is no “basic” Internet, only preference trained search engines to productively narrow one’s options. Once at a site of interest, you can, of course, give them your e-mail address, if you want constant invitation of one’s ever dwindling time. Just today I’ve been asked to view a dozen articles and watch 3 short videos. I look at my inbox and begin triage towards some sense of prioritization and relevance.

Traditional media had the advantage of most of us being on the same page, even if those pages looked largely alike. When three channels reigned, at least people were in the same technologically conveyed loop. Today, those myriad sites wishing to provide assistance in connecting the dots have a lot of dots to compete with. What such sites attempt, and I admire the attempt, is like trying to herd cats away from their increasingly independent instincts when the very essence of our new e-world is to interconnect people to what is predetermined to be their existing preference. Consumerism trumps divergent edification.

Communities and nations can improve if positive social dialog is promoted. Coincidentally, or purposefully, the Internet, created as a national defense strategy, now makes it more and more difficult to get everyone’s attention communally focused. How convenient that an already participatory beleaguered populace could find even more distraction. The Internet’s “interconnectedness” claim rings hollow for me. Social disconnectedness seems more apt. Outside of a few voices in print material, I haven’t heard many connecting those dots, but they probably are, on some website, or some blog, that I will never encounter.

Despite its profit driven corruption, there are many worthwhile merits of what some describe as the greatest social upheaval of all time. That its merits don’t convincingly offset that upheaval isn’t particularly bothersome to those seduced by such sensationalized socialization.

The People’s World Peace Project, however, is definitely worth a look. Another great website with similar objectives is Avaaz, a “campaigning community bringing people-powered politics to decision making worldwide.” Both sites speak to practical positive solutions by connecting kindred issues and those organizations’ separate problem solving.

By whatever means, interconnectedness remains an admirable goal. Experience of others, positive change of any type, is always a step in the right direction. A culture of peace, through encouraged understanding rather than accepted hatred, is not beyond the realm of possibility.

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Gary Anderson lives in Bath.