I sit here on my couch and connect to the world. I like it.

9pm on the couch. I am talking to Manchester about the horrible bombings, watching the same BBC World feed that they are. 8am, on the couch again (hey, it’s raining ok?) and I am sitting here drawing on a ’sketch pad’ with 12 other anonymous people somewhere in the world, while I am reading an RSS feed from the US as well as looking over a business email from a company in Eastern Europe. The world has become very small and I am doing all this while sitting on my couch.

Welcome to Starship Couch.

For those that choose the option, the world has no frontiers, no boarders and has become insanely small. I love it. I sit here in Canberra, receive orders from all over the place and I dispatch them through a global postal service. When you think about it, as long as I have a decent web connection and access to the postal service, I can be anywhere I want to be, because at the same time I am everywhere. As much as many people bemoan what technology has done to their lives, there are others, like me, that rejoice in the freedom it offers, if you choose to embrace it.

Being ‘connected’ to the world in this way changes your outlook on a lot of things, most noticeably your access to information. The world effectively is becoming a single community and ‘local’ affairs become only a small part of the entire equation. Media becomes freeform, just look at yourself; you are sitting there reading this. We publish this for no other reason than we like to share our views on things, our experiences. If we talk about a product, a service, we do so from the same perspective that you would, as a user, a consumer, as someone who forked out hard earned cash to buy whatever it is. To us, that means more than reading it in some magazine, where the words might be influenced by advertising dollars, or skewed by the masthead directive. There are exceptions to this of course. If you are into riding mountain bikes the two exceptions are America’s Dirt Rag and the UK’s Singletrackworld. Maybe to an extent they are the the analogue versions of this, the big difference being that they still rely on people buying what they do, whilst we can do this for nix (though interestingly both also have very active ‘free’ forums from which they draw material and inspiration). Being able to publish for free, or almost free has a certain respect to it; doing something for nothing other than the sake of doing it means that you do it because you want to, not because you have to. Sorta why when I go to buy something I research it on the web - I want opinions of users, not editors.

But I digress.

Being connected to the globe is an odd experience. Take for example the online ’sketch pad’ I mentioned. I hop on the site and can scrawl what I want, whilst at the same time people anywhere else in the world can see what I am doing and interact, in real time, with it. I wrote the word ‘Australia’ and someone instantly responded with a scawl…in French! It took us a little time to translate. Someone else drew a head, I added to it as they went. Sit back and think about it for a bit. It will freak you out. Want to partake? Simple, click here, interaction with people from other countries is that easy and that free.

At the same time you can expand what you do and how you exist. You can buy what you want and sell what you have globally and with little effort. Transact currency free of traditional banking structures and conduct business with others who are at the other side of the globe almost instantly. The market place is no longer immediately outside your door, it’s literally around the globe. For a small fee, stream news media from global providers, offering you a global perspective. Sign up with a company such as Skype and talk globally for free, or ‘local’ interstate for less than using a traditional monopolised carrier. How cool is that?

The tyranny of distance, the one thing that has always limited the average person and thus mankind as a whole is fast becoming a thing of the past. Local no longer refers to the city you live but the country.

Someone once said to me, when we were talking about a print editor’s tirade against all things web, that he (the editor) has already lost the battle without knowing it. People have realised that they can get much of what he offers for free at a global level, whenever and wherever they want it. While people will always buy print, many will form opinions, buy goods and exchange thoughts through the web; print is fast becoming the icing on the cake, not the cake itself. Unless the icing is great, you can give it the flick, it’s the cake that fills you up.

I like being connected. I like being free. Best of all I like being global. Starship Couch suits me fine, won’t you come along for the ride, it’s sure to expand you mind…

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