Digital Window Shopping

Time to blog? I think so.

I've been in a blog-reading loop for a few weeks. So much so that I haven't set aside time to write. Guess that's a feature of the blogosphere: digital window shopping galore.

Being in this ether doesn't require much more effort than the ability to click. Real-world window shopping involves a different level of effort-- the actual movement through time and space. Clicking through blogs, I have a sense of the ultimate and encouraging interconnectedness of the Web, but lose that all-important (to me) tactile experience of "fog on glass".

In my junior year of college, I took a class called "Utopian Political Thought". The professor included works by authors who posited "dystopia's" as well-- basically, anti-Edens. I had never considered the genre before, though I had become familiar with it (being Black).

A part of the blogosphere/Web clicking sensation reminds me of a story from that class that I have to dredge up; I believe it's by Borges. Anyway, it's one of those sci-fi tropes where technology performs most functions of daily life except human interaction, so that we become isolated. Isolated, ultimately, from ourselves.

The kicker is, of course, we've isolated ourselves by creating technologies that we hope will bring us closer to one another, make life easier, lighten our load.

Or maybe identity is shifting and I'm in the transition generation. I'm lamenting a loss of something that the next generation may deem quaint. There can be deep and sincere digital bonds, the same way there are shallow and deceptive relationships offline.

I don't know.

Nostalgia's a pendulum that swings non-stop between "what I knew" and "what I hope". When it hits the mid-point, I write-- like now.