It’s about this cold, detached, online “connection” thing. Does it really bring people together or does it just make us think so? A friend of mine—yes, someone whom I know in real life—recently posted his addendum to one of those bulletin surveys making its way through myspace (which, by the way, is a messy, clunky, slow website, but I digress), and the bulletin asked people to semi-anonymously reveal how many of their “friends” they had actually met in real life. Only one of those people had actually met all of his friends. All 121 of them. Now I can’t say how close he is to these people but I can speculate on the fact that 79 of the 80 people on that bulletin had not actually ever been in the same room as a fair amount of the people on their lists. And I mean brick and mortar room, not chat room.

So this got me to thinking: is the internet driving a social wedge between us all? Did it all start with the telephone and just go downhill from there? This is an old subject that has been rehashed many times over by better writers than me, so I will not pose an answer. But as I sit here alone in my small room typing on my expensive machine, I cannot help but wonder where I would be—where we would all be—without all of this digitial intermediary. Would it be better or worse? My answer is a little bit of both and a whole lot of neither. The human condition will manifest itself through whatever contrivance we invent. I just felt like posting a little bit on the topic.

Enough of my existential ramblings. Read The Stranger if you want better literature. But that hamster out of control video on myspace sure was funny, wasn’t it? You can’t get that stuff in an Albert Camus book.