The Geography of Everywhere
If you're looking to buy a house, it makes a big difference where you are. A good rule of thumb is to favor a small house on a good street over a big house in a sketchy neighborhood. Geography matters.
The first lesson that the Internet ever taught me, way back 15 years ago while I was still connecting to AOL on my parent's dial-up connection, was that geography was going to matter less and less in the coming years. I remember the AOL chat rooms being like a social sandbox, where I was free to say whatever I wanted without many consequences. If I messed up, I just went someplace else. It was a like a big red do-over button.
I remember stumbling across a Geocities page of some fellow teenager in Tennessee in 1998 discussing his fondness for one of my favorite bands. He wrote, "If it weren't for their music, and me sitting alone in my room listening to their albums with my headphones on for hours, I might have gone nuts in tenth grade." It was odd, because the more I read, the more I started to think the words on the screen could have been written by me.
Part of it was that the Internet afforded the writer anonymity. But on that day, reading that person's thoughts, I realized that I wasn't special. I thought I was, because I was attending high school with hundreds of people I believed I didn't have anything in common with. But seeing all these people on the Internet thinking the same thoughts as me was somewhat alarming, because I valued what I thought was my individuality.
Time was, you were confined to the people with whom you were going to school. 5th grade was like that. I knew the 20 other kids in class, and more on the playground, but that was about it. I couldn't plug in and chat with someone else like me halfway around the world just by turning on a computer. Now, you can, and almost everyone does, every day.
I realized that going forward, as the Internet got bigger, being a unique individual was going to get harder and harder. Over a decade later, that seems even more true now. There are thousands of people with blogs just like mine, thousands of people that tweet like me, who like the same music, and so on. This has its upsides; each of us can know, just by Googling a bit, that we're not alone in the universe.
And yet, I wonder if that omni-present reassurance we can get from cyberspace has any downsides?
The first lesson that the Internet ever taught me, way back 15 years ago while I was still connecting to AOL on my parent's dial-up connection, was that geography was going to matter less and less in the coming years. I remember the AOL chat rooms being like a social sandbox, where I was free to say whatever I wanted without many consequences. If I messed up, I just went someplace else. It was a like a big red do-over button.
I remember stumbling across a Geocities page of some fellow teenager in Tennessee in 1998 discussing his fondness for one of my favorite bands. He wrote, "If it weren't for their music, and me sitting alone in my room listening to their albums with my headphones on for hours, I might have gone nuts in tenth grade." It was odd, because the more I read, the more I started to think the words on the screen could have been written by me.
Part of it was that the Internet afforded the writer anonymity. But on that day, reading that person's thoughts, I realized that I wasn't special. I thought I was, because I was attending high school with hundreds of people I believed I didn't have anything in common with. But seeing all these people on the Internet thinking the same thoughts as me was somewhat alarming, because I valued what I thought was my individuality.
Time was, you were confined to the people with whom you were going to school. 5th grade was like that. I knew the 20 other kids in class, and more on the playground, but that was about it. I couldn't plug in and chat with someone else like me halfway around the world just by turning on a computer. Now, you can, and almost everyone does, every day.
I realized that going forward, as the Internet got bigger, being a unique individual was going to get harder and harder. Over a decade later, that seems even more true now. There are thousands of people with blogs just like mine, thousands of people that tweet like me, who like the same music, and so on. This has its upsides; each of us can know, just by Googling a bit, that we're not alone in the universe.
And yet, I wonder if that omni-present reassurance we can get from cyberspace has any downsides?