Who cares about internet, and in what ways?

Where in your scheme of priorities might internet fit? Maybe you like the good old days with communication face-to-face? By letters sent via the Post Office? Phone calls? Telegrams? Maybe you rate God, family, job in that order, and any communication at all has to be about those and only in ways that existed before, say, 1970?

Maybe you find e-mail with family or friends useful, but the cheapest dial-up, say juno.com, is plenty fast for you, the main idea is to minimize expense? Are your kids sending you photos and movies of your grandchildren as attachments and dial-up is just too slow?

Maybe you run a business and could sell your wares using the internet? Advertise, for instance? Run your own catalog with current inventory updated with every order arrival and sale? Could you find something to special order for a customer using the internet? Could you communicate with your suppliers using the internet? Could you file government forms using the internet?

Maybe you're a health care practitioner and you could communicate with patients using the internet? Learn new developments via the internet? Research diagnoses via the internet? See images such as X-Rays, CAT, MRI, just video of the patient, maybe to see symptoms or just the facial expression as the patient talks? How about creating and accessing records using the internet?

Do you have an office job where you're mostly dealing with a computer, entering data, writing journal articles, books, articles and the like? Programming? Could you convince your boss to let you do that at home most of the time? Maybe you can't work at home because the rest of the family would distract you? How about teaming with some neighbors to have a neighborhood telecommuter work center?

Would you find a college lecture as a sound file, or a video file, useful? How about if you could exchange e-mail with, or video-conference with, the lecturer or a teaching assistant? Or if you teach or create courses yourself, could you publish them using the internet?

Do you own a car? Do you drive much? Could you drive less if you had internet, particularly faster internet? Have you considered that for much less than the price of a new car, quite a bit less than the price of a reliable used car, you could install conduit from your residence or business to two or three adjacent neighbors? That if everybody did that, really, really fast internet connections within town would be practically free? And if every town did that, fast connections within the state, within the nation, globally, would be pretty inexpensive? It's probably less than the cost of gas, insurance and maintenance of your car for a year, to put in that conduit that will serve you and your neighbors as long as the lifetime of that car, probably longer.

Are you a banker, but you only make loans for real estate or cars? Did you ever consider financing computers or conduit to the neighbors? How about loans on tools that help install that conduit? How about loans on network equipment for neighborhoods?

Are you an investor? Could you use the internet to help you manage your investments?

Do you travel? Would the internet help you arrange your trips? Do you know about mapquest, maps.google.com (including streetview for dozens of cities,) Google Earth and the like?

Do you vote? Would you know more about candidates and ballot questions if you used the internet to study?

How about just using the internet to make your bill paying more convenient and reliable?

Are you a government worker? Maybe your IT department is busting a gut to help you get something useful from computers and internet? Maybe, though, you're frustrating the efforts of others to expand internet access -- stop that!

Are you afraid technology will eliminate your job? Could you learn to do something else, perhaps using technology? Would that be worse than doing something a machine or somebody in Asia could do?

What are you waiting for? Somebody who will say, "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you?"