Battening Down Hatches …
Principle # 9 – Managing in a Wired World
The Last Casualty ?
Pinciple # 10 – Managing in a Wired World
Barlowfriendz Comments … Me Too
January 26, 2005 06:58 AM
28 – Mark
Very cool story. I have made many e-friends. Very fast friends with whom I “converse” several times a week. I know their likes, wants, needs, desires. About their families, jobs, friends, and they, in kind, know the same about me. They are the kind of people I would choose as friends had I the occasion to randomly meet them in person. The internet has allowed what travel has not, is the bottom line. I think of those who don’t get it, and feel that it’s their loss.
Powered By Qumana
-->
A Real Connection ? … You Decide
The bottom line is this: they reached at random out into the Datacloud and found a real friend. And I feel like I have been graced with a real friend in both of them. Given the fact that I’ve been getting interesting messages from distant strangers since 1985, why do I think the big deal? Why is this different? Because these strangers have voices. There’s a lot more emotional bandwidth in the human voice. I’m always surprised by the Meatspace version of someone I’ve only encountered in ASCII. I’m rarely surprised by someone I’ve only met on the phone. But one doesn’t get random phone calls from Viet Nam or China, or at least one never could before.Skype changes all that. Now anybody can talk to anybody, anywhere. At zero cost. This changes everything. When we can talk, really talk, to one another, we can connect at the heart.
The potential of establishing a real emotional connection is exponentially advantaged. And I honestly don’t think it would have been any different had they been guys. In the days since, I’ve received another random call from a guy in Australia. We talked, very entertainingly, for awhile. I’m glad to know him too. (He wasn’t trying to practice his English. He actually seems to prefer his version. He was just doing it because he could.)
And then there is the mysterious imprimatur of coincidence. This had never happened to me before and then it happened twice in a single night with two Asian girls who are within days of being the same age as my eldest daughter. (In fact, Dung Vu is three days younger than Leah.) Somehow this seems too weird not to have been meaningful. (Though this belief could be another symptom of my well-established apophenia.)
Anyway, I feel as if the Global Village became real to me that night, and, indeed, it has become the Global Dinner Party. All at once. The small world has become the intimate world.
I’m beginning to think this Internet thing may turn out to be emotionally important after all.
Powered By Qumana
-->
