I find it truly amazing that with the web it makes it so much easier to find people. Say you think of someone you haven't talked to in years, or maybe had a crush on in highschool. You can look them up on their Amazon wishlists, their wedding registries, Intellius, Google them for photos. It's so bizarre, and yet, now that we are in this mindset, it almost becomes not a very big deal. I suppose it will get to the point that you find a long-lost friend's e-mail or web site and get in touch with them, and it will be like "so what, I can't believe you it took you this long to find me."
A passage that sort of parallels this is from Galatea 2.2 by Richard Powers:
"The web was a neighborhood more efficiently lonely than the one it replaced. Its solitude was bigger and faster. When relentless intelligence finally completed its program, when the terminal drop box brought the last barefoot, abused child on line and everyone could at last say anything instantly to everyone else in existence, it seemed to me that we'd still have nothing to say to each other and many more ways to say it."
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Would you rather be an unknown or a known dwarf?
1 comment:
Interesting. Gives me an idea for a story: you are able to communicate with the dead through the internet, and it gets to be that the dead reincarnate and so on so many times that you have kind of a myspace page with 20 mothers, 20 fathers, 40 siblings, 1000s of friends that you knew well, etc.
By the way, this is your brother Tom, not some random crazy guy on the internet. I'm enjoying the entries you've made so far, keep it up!
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