Telepubbing

St. Patrick's Day came and went with little occasion, for the most part -- My hair has been dyed red, my day was mostly uneventful. My plans for drinking with coworkers were pitiful and poorly realized. Instead, I came home, logged on, and sat in front of my computer.

Surprisingly enough, this worked out rather well. I've been pining for my friends a lot lately, and when one of them was online (the best of the bunch, and my best man to boot), we wound up idling away the evening sharing a few pints of Guinness across several hundred miles, sharing some music, and just chatting like we hadn't done in ages.

The phrase that came to mind was telepubbing. Isolation gets easier as more means of interconnecting become available. It's the strange paradox of telecommunication, in my experience -- I have instant access, and I want instant access: to my friends, to my amusements, to everything. When I don't, when I can't have it, well, I'm jarred back into the realization that it's just me, alone, in front of my computer again. Staring at a screen, burning into my retinae. My friends are scattered across the globe now, and that distance ought to be meaningless with the technology at my disposal, but it's not. I've lost track of friends in Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Italy, and a few in Japan. Even friends in California, because the nature of telecommunication is so isolating, because it requires so much more initiative and still feels so much more shallow.

I've been following a lot of weblogs lately, and it struck me suddenly why. It's content, real content on the web -- everyone has a weblog, it seems, and it reminds me of the earliest days of the internet, when everyone had a website. The difference is that we all have content and updates, regardless of how trivial -- an entire world, given equal weight and equal voice if you just know how to look for it.

That's why this telepubbing experience struck me so hard -- it felt natural again, a kind of 'hanging out' I haven't enjoyed in ages... Comfortable. Easy. Fluid. It's what i've missed, even from my real-world interactions. It's what I needed.