a minor obzervation
I'm reading the book Future Shock by the 70's sociologists and futurists Alvin Toffler (for whom I was named) and his wife Heidi Toffler. They predict that in the future (as viewed from 1970!) people will have more residential mobility, fewer "roots" to local communities, and less-committed social relationships as a consequence of geographic relocation. They excerpt this passage from the 1957 novel The Floating Opera: "Our friends float past; we become involved with them; they float on, and we must rely on hearsay or lose track of them completely; they float back again, and we must either renew our friendship-catch up to date-or find that they and we don't comprehend each other any more."
Even as this quotation calls to mind an echo of Gatsby's closing line, I couldn't help but protest, even though I feared it to be dead-on, that technological developments have allowed said friendships to maintain themselves over despite the gulfs of distance or timing. LiveJournal, AIM, Myspace, Facebook and its friend newsfeed feature-these all create a substitute, albeit an imperfect one (perhaps better termed as a supplement, mm?) for regular or deliberately-scheduled interaction between separated friends. I miss people gee whizzers
Even as this quotation calls to mind an echo of Gatsby's closing line, I couldn't help but protest, even though I feared it to be dead-on, that technological developments have allowed said friendships to maintain themselves over despite the gulfs of distance or timing. LiveJournal, AIM, Myspace, Facebook and its friend newsfeed feature-these all create a substitute, albeit an imperfect one (perhaps better termed as a supplement, mm?) for regular or deliberately-scheduled interaction between separated friends. I miss people gee whizzers