Hyperconnectivity; just say yes!

Tapestry 27; Three Fates, from a 1943 drawing by Henry Moore.

I’ve spent the vast majority of my evening procrastinating. I can afford to do this, at least for now, but whislt I know I can, and countless times before today have envied others for being able when I was not, this evening I started to get irritated. And procrastination that is also an irritation, is the very worst kind of evil and requires examination and rectification! Which I did.

It begins with my dear friend Mr Dandy, frequent commentator on Bella, and a ‘Facebook friend’ of mine, who has taken a great disliking to that particular networking internet site. And why should he not, when they change it so often as to make it impossible for it’s inhabitants to be comfortable? And we love it! When it contains the goings on of the likes of my dear Mr Dandy, who lives in another state, how can we not? There lives, in the quiet of my room, all my nearest and dearest who are overseas, interstate, and quite close to me actually, who are just too busy to sit down for a coffee, as we are all too familiar with.  But there are other sites that facilitate the same thing, and so I did a bit of internet surfing. By the time I had explored all the aesthetic possibilities at www.bebo.com I was over-wrought, over-whelmed and for the life of me could not work out how I could justify the time spent, (and the times to come) updating multiple statii, twittering and photo posting along with attending the in-boxes of three email accounts, and a web-log! What am I trying to achieve here?

Shortly, I am to move interstate, off the island in fact and onto the littlest best kept secret in Australia, Tasmania. I am going to be a long way from the vast majority of my family and friends. My primary concern is to keep those closest to me as close as possible. What a gift the world wide web is when it means we don’t have to wait weeks to hear about the ever important lunch possibilities for my friend in London, when she is having a bad day because of someone insignificant who did something completely inane and even more insignificant. It was vital when she lived in Sydney, it is VITAL now. And so it is with all my friends. But what struck me today as I weighed the pros and cons of internet social networks is how much more there is to be gathered.

Those intimate things, which are paramount to be sure, would not have equated on thier own, in a hand written letter, to the various interesting and wonderful people I have met online doing little more than simply ‘being’ within the FB community. I might like to be able to choose; one blog, one email address, one socializing tool, but who am I missing? What information is there to be had that I shan’t be privy to?

We are constantly romanced by the myths of Fate and the weaving of things that are and that are not. As I began to streamline my various profiles: My twittering appears on my blog, Bella appears on Facebook, Facebook status updates and twittering bouncing into Bebo, deciding to place links to all my profiles here on Bella, I suddenly understood, possibly for the first time, that the World Wide Web, is more than an arbitrary network. I was doing the weaving, like a spider, criss-crossing back and forth. Unlike any other time in the history of humanity are we connected, and how much of that connectivity we as individuals can control.

I’ve often tried to ‘manage’ my time in the web and various sites, much like I would a working day. But the web is so like the spider’s in the front garden, that I have decided that henceforth, I shall scuttle along it’s intricate threads following the vibrations of all the juiciness of knowledge, information and experience as they occur, and as I want. When I want, well outside of business hours and no longer apologize. And marvel that how in the most civilized of places human kind is all at once it’s most scientific, etheral and insect like.