"We have built invisible cubicles around ourselves, accessible only via text. This is the information age. The future is unfriendly."
-JLW
This sentiment has come around before, and it has a sort of bite to it - but I say to you that it's upside down.
Time was, and it wasn't that long ago, that we were far more deeply limited in what we could discover, in who we could stay connected to, in who we could be as a result. A sort of village effect defined both our happiness and our discontent in terms of personal relationships. You could write, and telephone, but the constant digital contact of the present Twittering Facebooker, wasn't even really conceivable.
We can now be much more of who we want to be and in contact with many more of those we wish to be with. And that's good, right? It's the miracle of the information age, it's a revolution in connection and identity; this is what we want - we're paying for it, and we're doing so because we want it.
But the revolution is incomplete. Or, at least, the revolution has not yet matured. There are people who meet online, and then come together and get married. In any long-running online community, there are "Let's have gatherings!" calls, and sooner or later you'll see wry jokes about "we should all get together and buy a camp, or move into a suburb, all together". We get this events, these statements, because our digital resolution is not all we want.
If a group of people who know each other online gather, and then go from here to there together, they won't go one at a time even if we know the way - they will sort by instinct a way to walk together - the cool 'group walking' that kicks up Reservoir Dogs is not an accident, nor are many of the other similar scenes. We're built to coordinate with each other in immediate ways, and when we don't get a chance to do that, something is odd. There's a sense of community that can be found in a construction crew that can't be found in the most refined sharing of inner thoughts and identity-bits online. It's not a "better" communal sense; it's just part of the other communal sense.
After the snow melts, the summons will go out to my friends, calling us to the local legislature to picnic and draw on the pavements with chalk. We'll draw individually and make something big together, we'll chatter almost meaninglessly about things we could have easily said in other media. We do this every year - and it's not nearly always me that makes the call; a lovely lady named Holly can be credited as the origin of our chalk days. In many ways, it's the most trivial and silly of events. In others... It isn't.
Moving and laughing and playing together, in the light, matters.
The information age is, in the end, a fantastic supplement. But if it's all you get, then you end up in a deep cocoon, wondering how it all went bad. The revolution, taken alone, is incomplete.
