Saturday, November 15, 2008

I WAS Going to Send This to All My Friends...

I was going to send this to all my friends. Got into the Compose mood, carefully checked all the contacts who might find it worthwhile, carefully placed the contact into the bcc: field, so they wouldn't be spammed.

Then, meaning to close another window, I closed the mail program.

As Homer says, "D'oh!"

So, I'm posting the link here, thus re-affirming the main point of the post - we don't communicate directly with friends anymore.
My old friend Ake (’awke’) Larsson was in St. Petersberg when he received my letter this week, as usual tinged with news about the curious desperation and isolation of Life in America.

He wrote about the boozy St. Petersberg tables where they were celebrating some colleague’s PhD, and it sounded like something out of Milan Kundera–just that, the idea of people at a table, the same table, for a long night in which an event is consecrated and celebrated, between people, friends, who went out of their way, in this case traveled from Sweden to Russia, to celebrate.

How often do any of us have that anymore?

These damn machines.

I fear the erosion and extinction of corporeal time, corporeal friendship, bodies together in time and space, more than I fear any other loss including the first amendment or polar ice caps. I sit at miserable piece of white plastic each night and I type forth, trying to connect and be less alone. The Internet. Soundless, it starves us very slowly. It is like a very tiny straw through which we are permitted survival breath. My father’s voice–I rarely hear it anymore. Friends voices, I never hear them. We email each other about getting together and then we cancel and send more email. Like ash flakes falling on a dying world, these emails.
Read the rest - it's a provocative treasure.

After reading it, I understood the rock opera Tommy as I never had before.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Funny you mentioned St. Petersburg. I've been posting over at thepeoplescube.com as Grigori E.R.
Having a lot of fun with it. The site is a bunch of conservatives running around playing communists.

Wasn't kidding when I said I've been working with computers since the early '60s. To me computers are just tools. One of my fears over the years was that people would start letting the computers do the thinking for them or distract them from thinking. This I see just about every where now. You go in to a store or bank and if their system is down you're out of luck.

Same with the cell phones and laptops. If they can't get a signal or connect to the Internet it's like "what do I do now?".

Forsaw problems when the chat rooms first came out. People were staying up all night, pounding away at the keyboard. Now the virtual world of communication is upon us. E-Mail, instant messaging, blogs and endless comments to those blogs.

It's gotten worse. Trying to have a coversation with some folks is nearly impossible with their cell phones going off every 10 mins. I see people walking in to Wall Mart on the cell. They're still on the phone when they come out. What in the world are they talking about?

Bottom line is that computers & too much communication is distracting people from using their mind.

Call me old school. If I want to speak to you, I'd rather pick up the phone or have a face to face conversation.

I cover many blogs. Some are very insightful and some of the comments are brilliant. On almost every one I see a constant stream of the same people commenting over and over. Me, I read the blog, check the comments and if I have something new or constructive to add I comment and I'm gone.

All this technology is a wonderful tool, but only that. We are communicating like never before. Question is are we?

I'd rather be outside in my rocking chair thinking about the structure of space itself and how it proves my gravitational wave theory.
But that's me.

Anonymous said...

spam rircle@gmail.com sindy.yong@gmail.com

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