Past writings & the dangers of Internet procrastination

Last updated on: May 7, 2013 at 6:37 pm by Svend White

Past writings & the dangers of Internet procrastination 2013-05-07T18:37:06-05:00 Svend White

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Having grown weary of the chore of googling myself every time I want to find past writings, I’ve added to each page a list of links to past writings available online. It’s called "My writings elsewhere".

Here’s the current list, for those interested:

2008-01-23: "MLK’s ‘Dream’ Unrealized and Undigested"
Religion Dispatches
2007-12-31: "UK Muslims & the ‘War on Christmas’"
Religion Dispatches
2007-11-01: "Jyllands-Posten and the Otherization of Europe’s Muslims"
THE CARTOON DEBATE AND THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS (book chapter)
2006-07-06: "Theme Park Segregation: The Problem with ‘Muslim-only’ days"
alt.muslim
2006-05-29: "Muslim Stereotypes: Understanding Muslim Language"
alt.muslim
2006-02-01: "Comprehending Catastrophe"
Islamica Magazine
2005-12-06: "Progressive Islam: Lessons learned from the PMU Experiment"
alt.muslim
2005-06-02: "Politics of Hijab: Should Muslim women be on Mt. Everest?"
alt.muslim
2005-06-01: "There ain’t no mountain high enough"
Q-News
2005-04-01: "Voting is not enough"
Q-News
2005-01-01: "That’s right, he’s back"
Q-News
2004-08-30: "How Not to Fight Muslim Anti-Semitism: The Revocation of Tariq Ramadan’s Visa Fuels Bigotry"
MuslimWakeup!
2004-03-31: "Hijab hysteria: France and its Muslims"
openDemocracy
2003-11-01: "Promise & Peril: Prospects for Democracy in the Muslim World Today"
Muslim Democrat

I’ve left out a few things, but it’s thought provoking and even a bit depressing to survey such a short list when you’ve contributed a gazillion posts to all sorts of mailing lists as much as I have over the last decade and a half. (Unlike most of you whippersnapper new jacks out in the Blogosphere, I was scrappin’ with people over Islam, politics, and all sorts of other things, way back in the early 1990s when the World Wide Web was text-based and had yet to catch on outside techie circles. I still remember the excitement of downloading my first file–the Bhagavad Gita in plain text–via not the Web but rather the now extinct Gopher network*.* )

Sure, for many years my goal was simply to participate in an exciting new medium, a new "town hall meeting". I often found the exchanges enjoyable and stimulating–and I even made
a good number of friends and useful contacts that I otherwise probably would
never have known–but I can’t help but groan, Man, I had a penny for every long, carefully thought-out post that
was painstakingly constructed and then hurled into the ether of the
Internet debate, never to be seen again…. It was a life style or hobby of sorts, and this was participation in the dawn of an exciting new dimension of modern life, but the uncomfortable question remains: But what do I (or most other early Internet users) have to show for all those endless discussions and debates?

Oh well. As someone once wrote, God loves the lazy rainbow no less than the laboring sea.

The scary thing to me is that Internet today is far more addictive. It’s far easier (and tempting) today to fritter away one’s intellectual energy and spare time online. Facebookers take note!

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