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I sent this to a group of uni friends who keep in touch:

I am fascinated by social media and lifestreaming, though i have removed myself from a rather large amount of it.

I was surprised at the loss so many otherwise non geek type people felt when i left Facebook, quite odd reaction – how much they missed connecting with me. Erm, the phone? email? my blog?

Some of the best conversations i have had online have been since leaving, with people who would just follow my updates – who had no need to ask, to discuss, they KNEW already what was happening in my life.

We have reduced our lives to 140 characters or so in many cases, a series of updates and photos and location updates and…noone needs to find out the backgrounds, the feelings, life is a fast paced series of vignettes and snapshots. fake, junk food like equivalency. filling without nourishing or satisfying, yet we crave more.

Anyway, we have had twitter births, weddings – this was probably inevitable.

Now we have death. Death in the form of an execution. Government sanctioned death, tweeted by the official who confirmed the order.
Tweetage Wasteland : I Just Checked In To A Firing Squad.

Is it viscerally disturbing because it was an official? Because we don’t do death penalty here? Or was it the calmness, the almost indifference associated with tweeting? Just another piece of info, litter dumped in the stream, it has bobbed to the surface, but will
disappear again soon, just another piece of flotsam and jetsam that is human life online.

We are bytes of information.

I’m not sure if i am scared or optimistic. I value the connections i have made online, some really deep and valuable friendships that have lasted years. now, with a disability, i appreciate the ability to travel the world, as it were, even more.

It is terribly easy to think of it as fully living though. it isn’t. my kids keep me grounded, their sweet solid reality is a wondrous thing. The internet is people, yes, in that it is information and communication and entertainment –  all people derived. Yet if we lose
touch with people here, around us, if we lose our humanity in being online, what then?

Noone bats an eyelid at births online anymore, they just shrug and say well, that funny old internet. Now death is headed the same way. But murder – execution. Wow. Still trying to understand how i could become indifferent to that.

I guess the same way we can face the evening news without flinching, the violent dvds. They have all been leading to this. The more you see, the less you flinch.

Maybe. If the day comes when i could not flinch at this stuff, i am
trading in my humanity card – i am not fit to be part of the species.

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