At the risk of sounding hopelessly ancient, I just want to write for a moment about the amazing connectedness the internet allows us. Not too long after we graduated from college, my former roommates and I decided that every month we would each write a newsy letter about our lives, mail it to one designated person, and that person would make copies and mail them out to everyone. We even had a system for making postage fair. I remember feeling a little sad when we decided we could just email each other our letters. It seemed less personal, and I feared we would be less likely to follow through with writing when there wasn't someone specifically waiting for a letter to include in a packet. And we have lost that. I no longer get newsy letters in the mailbox from anyone, and I do miss them. Really, I get hardly anything in my mailbox at all. Instead I have the world of blogs, and live journal, and facebook, and it's completely different. With facebook I can keep up with my high school friend who moved to France. Without facebook, she'd be lost to me. With facebook, I know a little more about what is going on with my brother. He only lives fifteen minutes away, but we're all crazy busy people, and (nonsensically) checking in with family seems like something you can always do tomorrow. With facebook, I get to follow little pieces of the lives of people I knew and cared about in college, people who were more than acquaintances but not quite dear friends, people I'd be delighted to run into or see at a reunion, but people I wouldn't otherwise be thinking about. With facebook, live journal, and blogs, I get to keep up with some of the writers I've met through James River Writers over the past year. I feel fairly confident that I would not have had the courage, or made the time, to continue to forge connections with them if all I'd had was snail mail.
With blogs, I get to find out what all sorts of people are thinking about all sorts of different things. I get to peruse the thought-provoking musings of my friends the EDG and Bemused Writer. I can read Demon Baby and Me or Mothers of Brothers and be comforted that I am not the only one with a wild man four-year-old, strange parenting stories, and a take on motherhood that is a bit on the sardonic side. I can get a dose of humor from my friend Wildcat or from The Blog of Unnecessary Quotes (which you may have to be an English major to appreciate; no one else I've inflicted it on so far has been amused). And I can get a supply of information on teaching, reading, and writing that is so close to limitless that it sometimes makes me feel small in the same way that looking at a black sky of endless stars can.
It's different, this connectedness. In some ways, it's incredible. I can find out so much, about so many people, and so many things, so easily. And it can lead to better relationships and deeper understandings, great conversations, and new friendships. Or it can overwhelm with the trivial and mundane, providing a sense of connecting without any actual effort or relationship-building. For every well-written, thought-provoking blog, there's a silly quiz I feel compelled to take. For every scintillating tidbit about someone's life, there's another person telling me what he or she is watching on tv. Good and not so good. Silver lining and cloud.
Connectedness. Use it responsibly.
