For some reason, I spent thirty minutes staring at the screen trying to think of what to post here. Not for lack of material, but the opposite. I spend nearly every moment that I'm awake on the internet in one form or another these days, so thinking of a specifically interesting moment that would reflect culturally in some profound manner or that I could connect to the texts this week (especially Postman, who seemed off his rocker a bit in chapters 9 & 10) was a real challenge. The internet is my culture at this point. I spend for more time communicating through Facebook or Google Talk than I do face-to-face. I'm working on a book with people I've never actually met. The person who signs my paycheck and I have met once, for about ten minutes. In a way, thinking about cyberculture issues makes me think of an old joke: Two fish are swimming along when another older fish swims up. The older fish cheerily comments, "The water sure is nice today!", and swims away. One of the original fish looks at the other and says "What's water?"
Partially, that's what makes commenting on cyberspace culture so difficult. Postman is right in one sense on his comments about the social sciences: we're not blessed with the definitives of chemistry or geology, where there are specific laws of motion and matter that govern results, making them reproducible. With cyberspace, there's no particular definition of the playing field, either, as the internet is really an amorphous space changing based on perspective and time. Wood and Smith's book has been frustrating at times because it reflects an internet set in a particular place in time by the restraints of publishing. Should someone even bother to write a physical book about the internet? Shouldn't they just publish an online document that can change by the day? Would a crowd-sourced wiki better reflect the realities of online communication and research?
So, what experience to talk about? I thought one of the most uniquely "online" experiences I had during the quarter was that in this blog last week, I was going through the comments for my previous post realizing there was a comment from a friend of mine from my earliest days on the internet, back in the days when email groups were on the cutting edge of technology. We used to exchange email personally and via the group nearly every day for several years, but lost touch when families and professions started to get in the way. Somehow (he didn't even know how exactly), he stumbled upon this blog and made an effort to re-connect. We exchanged emails this week, catching up on each others lives, and hopefully, we won't let years go by without communicating. Still, he's not someone I've ever met in person, but we know each other well enough to be happy to be in touch with each other again. This seems like a situation unique to the internet age, to me. Sure, I imagine there were penpals who probably reconnected via postcards once or twice, but the nature of networks of information where people have multiple, separate connection points is something new, complicated, and worthy of academic investigation in a class such as this.
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I found it exciting that you were able to reconnect with someone you had met online, even if you had never physically met in person. I myself reconnected with someone this summer who had helped me out in the past. I saw them physically though. I doubt it would have been as good of an experience had I reconnected with them online instead. Theree is something to be said for the role the Internet plays in our personal relationships but I feel it can never fully replace face to face communication entirely.
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