43 bar steady 29.47 11mph NNE dewpoint 42 Beltane
Waning Crescent Moon of Growing
Well, ok then. The reader who wondered about my hydroponics is not a Fed. LOL they said.
It is a weirdness about the Web that we can connect directly with people, yet know nothing about them. The weirdness compounds when we realize the people with whom we come in contact in this way, we don’t know at all beyond a few words on a computer screen. In the case of comments on a website or a blog like this one the stakes are, for the most part, low, but when you consider the apparent number of people who meet up in person after such interactions.
All this reminds me of Alvin Toffler and his book, Future Shock. I still remember many ideas from that book because he was a good phrase maker. High tech, high touch is the one that comes to mind here, but in a slightly different vein than Toffler’s. His version was that the more we connect through technology, the more we will want to see each other in person. I believe that’s true, but I’m on another tack here. High tech, high touch heightens the need, the desire for personal interaction, yes. It produces that desire–the original sense of eros in the Greek, the desire for human contact–in a situation we have not evolved to understand.
We are animals wired over hundreds of thousands of years to read the language in another person’s eyes, the way they hold their hands, the set of their neck, the wrinkles and twitches of the mouth. Though we are often wrong even with those cues, at least in face-to-face encounters we have a chance to assess, to ponder. Words on a page are not the same. Not even close. It may be that we have a sophisticated reader’s intution about how language reveals the author, but that’s a game often got wrong by critics, so how good can we be?
The point is this, words without flesh, disembodied words put us at a disadvantage. We can’t judge the intent of a phrase, the reason behind a conjecture. This has led to the all too familiar problem of flaming where some unhappy soul takes this anonymity and uses it to vent, often just to vent.
Toffler also described Over Choice, a situation where we face more decisions about more matters than we can handle with anything approaching wisdom. This applies to people we meet through the electronic ether, too. The reader interested in hydroponics might be a valuable interlocutor, one whose journey with indoor gardening might supplement and enhance my own. And vice versa. Or, they could be, as I speculated, a law enforcement officer hiding behind the web’s anonymity. Because it is my nature to trust first and question later, I accept the response to my speculation at face value; but, I have no face. Therein lies the dilemma.
We must evolve some method, some means of reading people we meet on the web. I suppose that’s what Facebook, Youtube, Myspace propose to accomplish, but there it is often meeting people to be meeting people. And those social networking sites get gamed, too. An endless loop.
Enough on this. I have to get to work writing my piece for the Muse. It’s taken an odd turn. Wonder how it will finish?
