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jackofallgeeksAnd This, dear readers, is a major concern for me.
I need people. If I go more than a few days without seeing a good friend (physically in my presence), I start to get depressed. Sometimes having honest conversation over the ether (email, LJ, IMs, etc), or better yet the phone, can stave that off for a week or so. But it's more difficult than one might imagine, it seems, to have honest conversation over such media. And even still, if I go for more than a couple weeks without physical touch, I get depressed.
Psycho-philosophical discussions about what this says of me as a person aside, this is why LJ comments are so significant for me. I can write into the ether day in and day out, and you can consume my musings faithfully, but until there's an exchange of comments there's not even an intellectual interaction. I'm just, as the article notes, a 'faceless wall of sound.' That may be less true for most of you out there, who actually know me in the physical realm, but even I find I lose sense of who the person on the other side of the screen is if enough time goes by.
This is also why I'm a proponent of emails, because of the opportunity for intellectual interaction that it offers. It's not guaranteed, of course. Even speaking face-to-face can be superficial and meaningless. And I think it's a rather sad state of affairs when most conversations one has follow the form of "yeah, so, uhm, yeah." Sometimes I think that, interaction without meaning, speaking without saying anything, is even worse than no interaction at all, if only because it tends to degrade all communication.
And that's what I get up for in the morning, these days anyways. I get out of bed and drive to work and fiddle around with electronics so that I can earn money to allow me to keep in touch with people. so that I can maintain my ethereal presence, yes, but also so I can drive several hundred miles to sleep on a friend's couch (er, 'futon') or just spend an evening out for dinner and drinks. Which, appropriately enough, is what I'm doing tonight. (Uhm, the drinks, not the futon.)
I need people. If I go more than a few days without seeing a good friend (physically in my presence), I start to get depressed. Sometimes having honest conversation over the ether (email, LJ, IMs, etc), or better yet the phone, can stave that off for a week or so. But it's more difficult than one might imagine, it seems, to have honest conversation over such media. And even still, if I go for more than a couple weeks without physical touch, I get depressed.
Psycho-philosophical discussions about what this says of me as a person aside, this is why LJ comments are so significant for me. I can write into the ether day in and day out, and you can consume my musings faithfully, but until there's an exchange of comments there's not even an intellectual interaction. I'm just, as the article notes, a 'faceless wall of sound.' That may be less true for most of you out there, who actually know me in the physical realm, but even I find I lose sense of who the person on the other side of the screen is if enough time goes by.
This is also why I'm a proponent of emails, because of the opportunity for intellectual interaction that it offers. It's not guaranteed, of course. Even speaking face-to-face can be superficial and meaningless. And I think it's a rather sad state of affairs when most conversations one has follow the form of "yeah, so, uhm, yeah." Sometimes I think that, interaction without meaning, speaking without saying anything, is even worse than no interaction at all, if only because it tends to degrade all communication.
And that's what I get up for in the morning, these days anyways. I get out of bed and drive to work and fiddle around with electronics so that I can earn money to allow me to keep in touch with people. so that I can maintain my ethereal presence, yes, but also so I can drive several hundred miles to sleep on a friend's couch (er, 'futon') or just spend an evening out for dinner and drinks. Which, appropriately enough, is what I'm doing tonight. (Uhm, the drinks, not the futon.)
