Do any of you remember when you first learned about the Internet? I remember the place and the occasion, but not the specific date. It had to be sometime in the early 1990s. I taught for nearly 20 years at Carnegie Mellon University and they held regular workshops for adjunct faculty. During one of those workshops, the facilitator/professor introduced what were to me the first websites I had ever seen. I recall being intrigued by being able to view restaurant menus online; my fascination and vision of what the Internet meant was clearly limited. One comment made by this professor has stuck with me for over 15 years. He remarked that people who were not connected to the World Wide Web, through sites or through email, would essentially cease to exist at a certain level of being. They would become like dinosaurs and fade away as part of ancient history. He reasoned that social discourse would be conducted this way and that if one was not able to participate in it, or to exchange information through it, they were in effect, dead. My brother and I were talking about this idea of existence in cyberspace and he was commenting about the prevalence of blogs among professionals, particularly economists. He opined that in order to be part of the public exchange of ideas, you have to communicate in this way, in real time and have followers and commenters. This builds the modern version of dialogue.
A few weeks ago, I met a friend for lunch and as we were catching up, I told her about how much fun I have been having with facebook and with blogging. Carrie, as I'll name her, has no personal email account, no facebook page and does not use a computer except at work. I can't use what are key tools in my communications repertoire to keep up and connect with her. And I was reminded of the comment from that years-ago workshop.
So, I blog, therefore I exist?
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