[photo by Mia McCullough]
"Life is random as a rolled pair of dice. / What those thrown cubes will show no one can know, / yet everyone thinks he wants paradise." — Gregory Orr, "Paradise", from The Caged Owl
January 12, 2009 Monday
This addiction is very insidious. It’s kind of like food addiction, in that it’s something that for the un-addicted is innocuous, even necessary, but for me it can be poison.
And it’s an addiction to a truly virtual world — a world that is not really there. It’s a binary world that exists on computers. Those people on Facebook — they’re not really there in front of me. They are real people writing into the same servers I am, people I know. But they are not really there on Facebook because Facebook doesn’t really exist.
Is it just a form of collective insanity, a co-created reality, all run by very sophisticated computer programming? Like any other good media, the creativity is in the thinking up of it and the creating and maintaining and marketing of it. But the comsuming of it for purely social reasons? It is a more or less creative void, especially if people fall into the addiction. It’s like a form of sleep. Like a coma.
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I'm actually in the middle of a blog post that's almost the opposite of your points here. Not that addiction to online stuff isn't real (I believe it is) but that online life can be just as real and fulfilling (though extraordinarily different) than offline life. I've blogged about that before. And if you'd like to read a bit about my own dance with 'net addiction and see what fine, fine taste we both have in blogger backgrounds, check this out: http://www.serenebabe.net/2009/07/moderinternetation.html
ReplyDeletethanks Heather! It is interesting to post this stuff and see where I was a year ago...and it isn't always consistent with where the thought process is right now. When the babes were small..the 'net saved me, in many ways--virtual community was essential to sanity.
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