John Murrell asks "How can I miss you if you won’t go away?" in a recent Good Morning Silicon Valley column:
When I first started wandering around the Net at 1200 baud, it was a solitary experience. As I gophered my way through distant labs and libraries, I could almost hear my footsteps echo through the shelves and stacks. No company. No distractions. If you really wanted interaction, there was IRC, but otherwise, you could socialize in relaxed deferred time on the message boards. Then came instant messaging, and we were never really alone again.
Now it’s practically a given that your time online is social time. Between commercial and peer pressure, you’re expected to maintain both a public presence for general interaction and a semi-private sphere for friends and family, both updated in real time with your activities, opinions, latest interests, location, and cultural tastes. The vehicles for this presence were homepages at first, then blogs, and now the widget-laden profiles on the social networking sites, along with an endless flow of pinging, poking and tweeting. It’s sort of funny that a system built by notoriously socially awkward geeks has turned into a mammoth, never-ending cocktail party.
I remember how hesitant I was to add comments to my blog. This was MY blog! I didn't want anybody else adding anything. Now I really like the connectedness, the small-pieces-loosely-joined-ness of my blog, flickr, facebook, LinkedIn etc. ... but it's at my beck and call, at my convenience, and I can ignore it if I choose. Much harder to do that face to face in the flesh world.
I like comments on my blog, too, but hey....you never comment over there! ;p
Posted by: Joel | Nov 20, 2007 at 09:12 PM