Maybe it’s the holidays. The naive heart once again becomes
hopeful, while the cynical head whispers what it knows. The
dialogue between heart and head turns on an axis of plenitude and
loss. We know how much we have and we know what we have lost.
The time we spend in the digital world, interacting in networks,
caught up in tangled webs of email that demand a response here
and now … it all has an immense impact that we don’t know how
to articulate yet.
The past is new in every moment, and our self-image, coalescing
like a materializing ghost, is continually challenged by the
kaleidoscope of time. Life in the digital world is an
accelerator, transforming the contents of what we think and who
we think we are.
It is a blessing and a curse to live in such interesting times,
when radical transitions throw into relief the transitoriness of
all things. The rapid coalescing and dispersal of communities in
cyberspace — the feeling that we struggle to reach out through
these images and words to touch one another … well, we can’t
push the river, can we? It will come. All things in their time,
including the illusion that when we connect on-line we connect
with flesh-and-blood human beings.
“Don’t send me an email,” a friend said last week. “Call me. I
want to talk to a real person.”
The telephone has done its work. No one dreamed when it was
invented that it was a personal communication device. Now we
think that electronic signals reconstituted as facsimiles of
speaking voices ARE real beings instead of their echo in a
virtual world.
Well … the flesh-and-blood human being who sent these images of
printed words into cyberspace like a note in a bottle … salutes
you.
