All right, class. Gentle Zacharias in the house, pay attention. I want you all to look up in the righthand corner of your screen, do it now. There's a little toolbar I haven't yet figured out how to turn off; we'll get to the metaphysical implications of that decision later. It says, among other things, "Next Blog." Don't touch it! Keep your mice to yourself now. We'll all take a field trip in that direction after the lesson. However, if you were to touch it, it would take you to another "blog" (by the way, let me say right now that I hate that word, think it's unmusical and idiotic. There is no replacement term, so I'm using it... but it's under duress. Okay, back to work.). I'm not sure the mechanism by which this hosting service chooses the blog to display next in the series; as far as I'm aware it appears to be random. Every time I click it, it takes me somewhere different. It's this function that makes me think.
I'm an incurable web-trawler. I don't think of myself as a "surfer," as it were, because that implies skimming a surface, whereas trawler implies what I actually am doing--tracing paths through a virtually unmappable expanse, throwing out lines and coming up with lost, strange objects, and occasionally bodies. I throw back the trash, I bookmark the things that catch my eye. As a result, my bookmarks folder is so swollen that I've had to create subfolders within to organize my collection. I have scores of these things--just bookmarks leading to sites that I've found, that strike me as impressive, interesting, frightening, weird, funny, beautiful. Whenever I show one of these things to one of my friends--mostly I share the funny ones, but for my more discerning compatriots I have gems that I tailor to their individual interests (and isn't that a mixed metaphor!)--anyway, whenever I show them to anyone, I invariably hear, "Where do you find this stuff?!" in a tone of bewildered awe. Now, I'm not sure what you do when you're online, but for some reason I seem to pick up things that other people never would have found. I honestly can't explain where I get this stuff. When I'm looking around online, I'm intensely involved in it, to a degree that I rarely experience and miss from my days of youth, when I could spend hours completely absorbed in some incredibly limited amusement. One thing links to another which mentions something that I wonder about, I run a search for it and click on the results and it takes me somewhere else which links to another thing. It's nothing mystical... I just follow trails.
This behavior, and the above "Next Blog" button, come together in a way that has me exceedingly tempted to click that damn button all day. The results are one of the more concrete representations of how I feel about the internet that I've seen. I want you now to view and internalize the following three words: "Dead Letter Office."
Heard of it? I'm not sure if it's a myth; I've been unable to find anything definitive. If it exists, it functions on this principle: that sometimes letters have an incorrect address, or no stamp, or some other error that prevents them from reaching their destination. Sometimes these letters have no return address, and so can't be returned to their sender. This, and in several other ways, is how a letter becomes "lost." I don't pretend to be an expert on the postal system; this is merely a layman's understanding.
What happens to lost letters? Do they just throw them away? Well, if the Dead Letter Office exists, the answer is no, they do not. Of course not. All these letters (hundreds, even thousands, there must be, over the course of a year in America) get sent to the Dead Letter Office. There, they are opened, scanned for interesting contents or valuables (money, checks, jewelry, drugs, etc.), and then burned. Simple enough.
Here's the rub: someone has to sit there and look inside those letters for cash or trinkets. And that person invariably is going to read a few. There's no reason not to; the letter will never be seen again by the person who wrote it or the person they were writing to. And we all like to read others' mail. Don't deny it, there's a certain rare pleasure in snooping, in allowing yourself for a moment to occupy a life that isn't yours, to see for a moment the inner workings of some convoluted personal process. So this fellow, the one who has to look inside all the letters, has at his fingertips an unending stream of figments, scraps of lives, one- two- three- ten-page snapshots of someone else's whathaveyou--love letters, suicide notes, business transactions, plans, declarations, denials, news, children, wedding announcements, pictures of somebody's baby who's probably in preschool now. Say you're this guy. Or girl, doesn't matter. You'll never meet these people, never hear of them again. But here you have a personal missive. It's a piece of a conversation, maybe. You didn't hear the antecedent. You'll never know what he said to make her cry so hard the paper is stained. You won't hear if they'll manage to talk their kid out of changing his major. You won't ever find out how the wedding ended up, if they stayed together. This woman never got the gift he sent her--will she be sad? Or angry? This suicide note never got to the person it's addressed to, the person that the suicide called "Beloved." Will they always wonder why he did it? And you know why, but you don't know him. Your information is useless. But now it's in your head. All these voices are in your head now, all these people and their scraps of life that you can't touch, not really, but somehow, for some reason, you know these things now. Would it drive you crazy? Would you want to stop? Or could you stand to look away?
Online journals are like that, to me. Especially if you press that button, the one that says "Next Blog." It gives you a random journal, one of thousands. You look at it, and there's a specific color scheme, maybe a picture, maybe a name, maybe nothing. And there's writing. There's someone agonizing about what to do next. There's someone's entire day written out blow-by-blow. There's an angsty poem. You don't know these people. All you know of their lives is what they show right there, in that one paragraph on the screen. You hear their pain, their rage, their happiness, and it's not meant for you. No one writes except in the desire to be read, if only by themselves. But these things aren't addressed to you. Maybe they're addressed to strangers, maybe someone can only talk about this to people they don't know. Maybe a kid is ranting about how annoying his girlfriend is. Why is he doing it online? He wants her to read it. He knows she will, and he knows it'll hurt her. That's why he did it. Maybe someone else is chronicling her travails with the school system for her parents in another state, so they can keep up and she doesn't have to talk to them on the phone and hear them lecture. Whoever these people are writing to, it's not you. But you've got your hands on it anyway.
Here's the difference: now you're not reading the letter, weeks later, with no idea where it came from. You're reading it today, the day they wrote it, and there's a button down there that says "Post a Comment." Now you can say something. You can ask questions. Maybe you'll learn more. Maybe you'll say something that will change the situation a little. What's important is that now you're connected. Now if you choose, you can get involved.
And the thing I want to ask you is: do you want to be? Sorting through someone else's dirty laundry is one thing, a sort of strange, detached, bitter thing, when they'll never get it back and never know your name. But it's quite another when you've got all the goods on someone, you know things about them their best friends don't know, and you have the power to say something, to put in your two cents--and are you ready for that responsibility? Are you ready to be involved in another human life that you don't know the first thing about?
It's hard. I'm incredibly shy, I am. And I'm abrasive before you get to know me. I don't meet a lot of people, and I don't make a lot of friends. It's for this very reason--that when you touch, when you connect, you get involved in something, you take on a responsibility. When you're meeting someone, learning them from the ground up, that's easy. You gain responsibility for what you say to them and how you affect their lives even as you're also gaining knowledge of them, and learning what the right thing to say is. But when it's online, like this, when you're able to jump right into the middle and offer your opinion right away, you have the power but no knowledge. They might not take your advice, it's true. But in my experience, words, no matter how much people discount them, always take root. They always bear fruit eventually. Are you ready to have roots in the brain of someone you don't know and may never meet?
These scraps of life, these paragraphs, these lost letters--they unsettle me, in a way. These are private thoughts in a public forum, and on some level I just want to back away, hands up, saying, "Hey, man, that's great, but it's none of my business." Sometimes I do. Sometimes not. Sometimes I touch, sometimes I pry, sometimes I speak--and sometimes things change. And I probably won't ever know how. I'm able to let go of the responsibility because I probably won't ever see it borne out, and because I'm self-absorbed enough not to especially care what happens to people I don't know, even if I've issued my opinion on their problem.
Most of the time.
But still sometimes there are those voices in my dreams, in my head. They're telling me middles of stories, no beginning, no resolution. They stack up behind my eyes and I begin to weigh them, wondering--how am I doing today? When I touched, today, when I spoke, today, did it do more harm than good? Did I cause a fight I'll never see? Did I fix a relationship I'll never know about? Did I do nothing? And if nothing I said changed anything, but it's still there, online, for anyone to read--did I come out on top? Or not?
The safe detachment of distance and impotence is denied us when the internet brings people on either side of the world as close as lovers--but this means that the rules of human interaction must change. Have they? How? Or are they the same--and does this cause problems? Where's your scale stand? Did you fall into the red today? By which I mean--did someone else, having heard your advice, fall into the red?
Do you care?
Discuss. Essay format not required. Responses in my hand at the end of the period. Get to work.
Labels: Art, Introspection, You
posted by Rivaine # 11:00 PM 
