(no subject)
The internet is inherently dehumanizing. We sample each other like treats on a tray. “I’ll have a little of him today, maybe a taste of her… none of those others today, thanks, maybe later…” When, exactly, does that sliding CLICK take place, when a real person meets a real person, and they become friends, sight unseen, no senses involved but the interaction with a computer keyboard, mouse and monitor? What an age we live in…
And some of us express ourselves so poorly that our true flavor never comes through to the sampler. I contend that a person can express anything in English, anything at all, and yet, so few of us make the attempt, or craft our words in such a way as to limit ambiguity to a choice that the writer makes.
In some cases, our lack of education prevents us from any but the crudest forms of cut-and-paste, or poorly-spelled, ill-punctuated, unclear attempts at communication. Even these manage to “hook up” sometimes. It’s astonishing sometimes how the barely literate manage to understand each other-anyway.
English is the language of growth and change. Text messaging, email and blogging are changing the way we communicate with each other. People who, a few decades ago, would have chewed off a leg rather than write a letter, are talking to friends everywhere by means of the written word, however distorted and changed from standard English.
Dehumanizing it may be, but I think it’s fundamentally a good thing. People are managing to reach past this built-in distance inherent in the medium and make real connections. I certainly have done that. I met my darling Chrysler as a bunch of print and pictures on Yahoo 360 and had no idea of his physical reality until barely over a month ago. It seems miraculous to me. He’s in my life permanently, now, and sometimes we look at each other and realize, “This is the person I was writing to for all those months!” It’s a trip.
I’ve “met” some of my dearest friends via this internet connection. Some, I’ve met in person, some not. There are peculiar inconsistencies even in that; for instance, one very dear friend and his lady shared one of my fruitcakes last December. I make really good fruitcakes, and they happen to like fruitcakes, so I sent them one. We had to correspond via snail-mail in order to make it all come together, but it worked and made another connection between us.
Friends I’ve known for years, friends I’ve met briefly, a very small number of family members, co-workers, and former co-workers keep in touch with me through email, for the most part. I’ve been slacking off horribly on keeping in touch lately, because Chrysler and I are very absorbed in each other. We both work, he during the day, I at night, and every moment we have together face-to-face is so precious that we have trouble sharing with anybody else, and our schedules just don’t work. Plus, he’s learning his way around Los Angeles, Orange and San Bernardino Counties, for fun and profit, and I’m helping.
I truly don’t mean to alienate anybody, but I’m afraid it’s happening, because I’m re-organizing my whole life, and it’s like having a couple of full-time jobs and a houseful of kids and incontinent pets. I don’t get a lot of time at the computer.
Today is a fluke, and there are (as usual) hundreds of tasks I’m neglecting because I’m choosing to sit down and ruminate loonily about the nature of communication in this new century. I think it’s basically a good thing-communicating usually is-but there are drawbacks. Just because there was a lonely time in my life when I spent every spare moment flirting, chatting, blogging, spinning my nonsense on the computer for hours at a time, doesn’t mean I’m going to be able to do that forever, for the rest of my life; I do plan, however, to get a handle on things and start communicating more responsibly in the future. It just can’t be the same as it was before. I don’t know yet how it’s going to be.
I would like to say, “I’ll keep you posted,” but I don’t want to commit to anything. That would be unfair and dangerous to my integrity.
Thank god for the internet, with all its flaws.