Are you familiar with the John Wyndham novel Rebirth?
In the UK, it was published under the title The Chrysalids.
It's your basic mutant telepath novel. 😊
I read it for the first time when I was 10 or so, and it imprinted me so much that when I first stumbled upon the Internet, Rebirth was my operative metaphor for the online communication experience.
I was a member of what was probably the first social media hub, a thing called the Well. It was just an amazing experience to exchange all these confidences and thoughts with people whom I did not really know and whom I would not have recognized had I passed them on the street! The Well was a text only thing. The nearest thing I could imagine to telepathy.
Now that the Internet dominates everyone's life and is basically, as you note, an apparatus for collecting marketing data—and this year, marketing data surpassed oil and natural gas as the world's most lucrative product—that frisson is mostly gone. I suspect that's what you miss.
I'm glad your old habit hasn't died and that you don't struggle too manfully against it because I quite like reading what you write (even when I don't comment) and would miss reading it if you disappeared.
So, you have one faithful reader at least. 😊
I will also add that quite a few people I know use fake names on Facebook. And fake genders and fake other things. I tell FB that I live in Turkey and get many amusing advertisements that way. Johnny9fingers is just a bit too obviously fake. Not that I'm encouraging you to join FB necessarily. Though FB does have its uses.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-08-04 12:27 am (UTC)In the UK, it was published under the title The Chrysalids.
It's your basic mutant telepath novel. 😊
I read it for the first time when I was 10 or so, and it imprinted me so much that when I first stumbled upon the Internet, Rebirth was my operative metaphor for the online communication experience.
I was a member of what was probably the first social media hub, a thing called the Well. It was just an amazing experience to exchange all these confidences and thoughts with people whom I did not really know and whom I would not have recognized had I passed them on the street! The Well was a text only thing. The nearest thing I could imagine to telepathy.
Now that the Internet dominates everyone's life and is basically, as you note, an apparatus for collecting marketing data—and this year, marketing data surpassed oil and natural gas as the world's most lucrative product—that frisson is mostly gone. I suspect that's what you miss.
I'm glad your old habit hasn't died and that you don't struggle too manfully against it because I quite like reading what you write (even when I don't comment) and would miss reading it if you disappeared.
So, you have one faithful reader at least. 😊
I will also add that quite a few people I know use fake names on Facebook. And fake genders and fake other things. I tell FB that I live in Turkey and get many amusing advertisements that way.
Johnny9fingers is just a bit too obviously fake. Not that I'm encouraging you to join FB necessarily. Though FB does have its uses.