So, over 90 million people are on MySpace these days. World's biggest meatmarket, right? Far out. I think the Net is radically changing human relations. I mean, Duhhh -- that couldn't be a more banal observation. But I remember when I was a 20-something, and we had a computer center (instead of a wired campus) -- e-mail was a rumor, not a reality. Everything was much more haphazard, dependent on time and place and circumstance. And yet, more natural, I suppose, more human. Again, Duhhh. There's good and bad with it, I guess. Maybe the sheer volume of people meeting each other increases the odds of something working -- but on the other hand, that volume also might make for more transitory associations.
The shrinking of the world has made it so. You find your soulmate in Rangoon, and you're in Kansas. Pre-Net, you'd never have met that person. Or persons -- maybe you have precisely 1,000 soulmates in the world, and the Net lets you reach out to 750 of them, you know? How does a person hold onto a relationship when faced with that?
The idea of "the One" has always been a romantic notion -- I've heard enough female coworkers talk about forgetting Mr. Right and opting for Mr. Good Enough, and guys joking about Ms. Right and Ms. Right-Now. Most of those people are 30-somethings, like me -- the last generation to know the pre-Net world. I don't know how 20-somethings and younger deal with the changes; they've never known any different -- a world without cellphones, e-mail everywhere, the Web, Internet dating, MySpace, etc. How that will influence human relationships (not just intimate, but across the board) hasn't even been really dealt with, yet.
For all the fundamentalists' insane carping about gay marriage killing Western civilization, I don't know if enough people have really thought about what the Net could be doing to change human relations, and at far greater speed. Not that I think it's necessarily a bad thing, these changes. Maybe the old ideal of The One should die, maybe it just leads to people being unhappy. I don't know. Unhappiness is central to the human condition -- we'll always be unhappy, I guess. Even perfection is an unhappy condition, in human terms -- we can't know it, and if we did, we'd probably be bored.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
i like this post. i feel like i'm right in the middle....of the thirty something generation who either had to ignore the internet or embrace it, and the younger tween generation who were born with web-enabled cell phones plastered to their ears. i got the internet when i was fourteen...and didn't get a cell phone until two years ago.
I'm still cell phoneless; my first job with Net access was in 1994. I can't imagine a wageslave-style job without Net access!
Post a Comment