Did you ever think how much LIFE is online?
We record our lives on line, communicate with each other online, meet new friends/boyfriends/girlfriends/spouses online. I spend at least eight hours a day with my eyes fixed on a screen, a blinking cursor, a bright search box. (OK, sometimes I look away, you now, when my vision gets blurry.)
Some of my most significant life moments happened when I was sitting in front of a computer.
Amongst the tubes and transmissions, the wires and wavelengths, and whatever else goes on that connects one part of the Internet to the person on the other side of the screen, somewhere tangled in there, is my life, or so it seems.
I have gotten news of new lives beginning and lives ending. I have experienced with friends the joys of planning weddings and the pain and anxiety of contemplating divorce. It is through e-mail that I first learned about where I come from biologically, and also through e-mail that I received first contact from the man who would become my husband. I can Google myself and discover -- by golly, I really DO exist -- along with several other Googlegangers. I have sent messages into the world, commented on news stories, and even written articles myself – and they’re all out there, somewhere.
The Internet went down in my neighborhood for about 48 hours after a powerful storm swept the Philadelphia region last week, and during that time I felt out of touch, almost displaced, not realizing until that time quite how much I rely on the World Wide Web as part of my everyday life. My connection to the world was severed, and I would almost go so far as to say I felt like a little piece of myself had been disconnected too.
Does anyone else feel that way?
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