It used to be that the Internet was the people you didn’t really know. It used to be that everyone had a handle, and that handle became the online persona that you hung your hat on. Not that the persona was radically different, but that the persona, the handle, was the online you. There was the online you and the offline you.
Now we’re all online all the time. But I don’t want the people I know in real life to be the people that I’m interacting with online. I want the people that I’m interacting with online to be people whom I can’t interact with in another way. It used to be that I would interact with people all over the world, people who thought and wrote about what they thought, and now it’s just people I went to high school with posting pictures of their kids and their dogs and their kids’ dogs, and that’s nice and all, that saves me from having to seek them out and talk to them and stuff, things I hate doing, things I never did, but that’s not the Internet. We shrunk the Internet, and now it’s just this circle of people we know. We corralled the infinite plane of cyberspace and erected a strip mall.
I think that’s part of what I love about Tumblr. I don’t know these freaks. What gets thrown across my dash is from people I don’t know, but who like similar things to me, and like sharing similar things. And I think I need to seek places like this out, these places where nobody knows my name.
I’ve chewed on this in a lot of different ways. I thought that the problem with Facebook was my friends, with my friends not sharing interesting things, but that’s not it. The problem with Facebook is that it is my friends, or sort of friends. The problem with Facebook is that it’s populated with people who know me, who think they know me, and that has a chilling affect on my voice.
Years ago, I was trying to explain what I liked about Twitter to someone, and I described it as shouting non sequiturs in a darkened room. I enjoyed posting little snippets of my life, and what enabled me to do that was knowing that while it would get seen and probably read by some people, it wouldn’t be seen or read by people that I know. And when my twitter timeline became populated with people I know, it really put a chill on what I wanted to share. I didn’t want this quirky thought to make a friend’s phone buzz as they got an SMS notification. I just wanted to send it out into the ether, a piece of flotsam from my mind, floating endlessly.
And maybe this is part of what’s sparking my excitement about this new blog. No one that I know is going to find it, or read it, not for a while yet. I can write and write and write, and know that if someone’s looking for something like this, eventually Google will lead them to me, but for right now, I can talk about what I want, and not worry about what other people are thinking. It’s going to be nuts, the day that some stranger comments on something that I’ve written.