Love is Old, Love is New...
So a screenname pops up on my "Friends" list from my Yahoo! Messenger buddy list on Trillian. It's a friend from Germany with whom I haven't spoken to for two years. I had met chatted with him five or six years ago and talked to him rarely after that first year. He's about my age, and I think I met him in one of those now-defunct Yahoo! chatrooms. So I pm-ed him, and he responds with, "Joshua!"
I never thought I'd see that dude again. He was a volunteer during the World Cup. He personally saw the match between the US and Ghana ( :( ). His comment was that it was truly a time to make friends. He met all sorts of football loves, Iranians included. That guy is my first degree of separation for the world cup and I didn't know it until today.
That encounter is the legacy of the new world: the legacy of globalization 3.0. The old emails and older user accounts make it increasingly hard to lose touch and lose information... unless we willfully do it. My two Yahoo! accounts, my Gmail, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, the college email account, the LJ blog, the Blogspot journal, the MySpace, MyFace, and who knows what else... all keep me in touch without really trying very hard.
One day, by checking old mail, I find out that The Nyx had added me as a friend on his MyFace, and also found the email to an old army buddy. Now, Trillian stores past IM conversations. The past is increasingly the newest facet of the future.
But that is the flip side, too. Connecting with people just isn't novel anymore. Java-based chatrooms went the way of laser discs for many reasons, and some of them raunchy, but I can't imagine making a penpal out of an Indian student. Why do that when you can email your friends back home and IM your college buddies to plan the next get-together? The fascination and imagination of the earlier part of the decade are largely gone for me, and the world wide web looks more like the local neighborhood with a large library.
The world may not be so new, then; maybe it's just recycled.
I never thought I'd see that dude again. He was a volunteer during the World Cup. He personally saw the match between the US and Ghana ( :( ). His comment was that it was truly a time to make friends. He met all sorts of football loves, Iranians included. That guy is my first degree of separation for the world cup and I didn't know it until today.
That encounter is the legacy of the new world: the legacy of globalization 3.0. The old emails and older user accounts make it increasingly hard to lose touch and lose information... unless we willfully do it. My two Yahoo! accounts, my Gmail, AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, the college email account, the LJ blog, the Blogspot journal, the MySpace, MyFace, and who knows what else... all keep me in touch without really trying very hard.
One day, by checking old mail, I find out that The Nyx had added me as a friend on his MyFace, and also found the email to an old army buddy. Now, Trillian stores past IM conversations. The past is increasingly the newest facet of the future.
But that is the flip side, too. Connecting with people just isn't novel anymore. Java-based chatrooms went the way of laser discs for many reasons, and some of them raunchy, but I can't imagine making a penpal out of an Indian student. Why do that when you can email your friends back home and IM your college buddies to plan the next get-together? The fascination and imagination of the earlier part of the decade are largely gone for me, and the world wide web looks more like the local neighborhood with a large library.
The world may not be so new, then; maybe it's just recycled.