This past Friday, I went to a going away gathering for a friend that is moving to upstate New York. A few years ago this would have been a much bigger deal to me than it is now. Even though we both lived in Southern Wisconsin it seems that for the past year or two we have seen each other only a handful of times, and those were usually at a LOPSA-Madison meeting.
We didn’t get together and just have dinner like we used to. We would “talk” to each other over IRC a couple of times a week, so there was still a connection. And it didn’t feel like we weren’t spending time together, because, well, “I just talked to Jesse on IRC”.
Over dinner for his going away gathering, we even made the comment that we would still “talk” to each other just as much, and probably end up seeing each other just as much as well. The days of someone moving a couple of hundred miles away making them “gone” are, well, gone. Email, instant messaging, IRC and video conferencing have made the world a little smaller. There are people that I have never met “in real life” or “meatspace” that I nonetheless feel a real connection to. I talk to them on a mostly daily basis. They live all over the world. One is a System Administrator for an all girls school in the United Kingdom, someone else is in Qatar. Others live in less exotic places like Pittsburgh, Los Angels, North Carolina, et cetera.
I don’t feel like I need to actually be in the same physical room with someone anymore to feel like we have had a meaningful exchange of ideas. Or even to just “hang out”. I spend time each week with people on the World of Warcraft realm Misha that I have never shared a physical location with. We communicate in text and using VoIP software. We laugh and tell jokes and strive together to accomplish goals.
Only communicating with someone with the aid of a personal computer doesn’t seem as fantastic as it did 15 years ago. In the late 1980’s when my family moved to Southern Africa, it really was “going away”. I still have not reconnected with some people that I knew before we made that move. Others I have reconnected with thanks to email and websites like Facebook. Has anyone else thought about this? Or do we just accept it? There are people that are using these forms of communication now that have always had them available. The idea of writing a letter to someone and then sticking it in the mail box seems anachronistic to them. Yet for hundreds of years that was the only way to communicate long distance. It wasn’t until the 19th century that the telegraph came into wide use, and that was largely killed off in the 20th century by the telephone. In February of 2006 Western Union sent the last telegram.
When will the last email be sent? What will replace it?
