re: Good thoughts
Today in Cyberspace we may post to strangers in thongs or even nude without mutual disgust or impropriety. Worst enemies, protected by the modest anonymity permitted, can question each others' most closely held beliefs. Yet there is real sadness here. I post and hurt another. He replies and hurts me, and angry we somehow stop, but happily we nearly always stop short of violence. I have heard of little violence resulting from web contacts, but walk into many bars and one can expect to see fist fights and even murders over subjects so insignificant that they defy belief. (Often sports, race, or Northern Ireland).
Cheap, universally accessible and very fast teleconferencing will start very soon with Katmai and @Home. Now when we sit down to play, we must at least wear a serape, comb our hair, and primp. I predict a return of beards and veils to protect inscrutability. This episode of correspondence may vanish. How could I bear only to write to you if, with the flick of a video cam and your compliance, I could see you. With teleconferencing we will be able to read nuance, grasp rising anger, pleasure, agreement, and friendship. We will be much more eager to transcend the distance (and ultimately language difference), to treat people as people. What does Emile actually look like? What do you look like? What does Paul Engel actually look like? I just finished studying the pictures of Members of Congress in the year-end Newsweek (the best single issue of a magazine I have ever read except for the John Hersey Hiroshima New Yorker). I could no longer correlate the face with the ideas they represented. Maybe with teleconferencing I could learn to do this again. |
