Like Points of Light

I'VE ALWAYS LIKED the idea that people could be plotted as blinking points on an enormous map, connected by gossamer wisps of concern and love. When I fell in love for the first time, that conception was an important part of it: not that I always knew where my beloved was, or what she was doing, or that I even wanted to know--but that our two lights were connected wherever we might go. Part of my attention had a home in something outside myself: and it felt, thought, moved independently of me. There is something about the metaphysics of separate-but-connected that I find profoundly appealing; that an object of concern has goals and paths to pursue without me is good poetry. For me, part of all human connection is geographic--locomotive--in nature.

These days, I'm connected--differently, but perhaps not less meaningfully--to many more people. It is no great task to fire off a text message and learn, in nearly real-time (subject to the recipient's idleness and consciousness), where on my map a person's light should blink into apparition. In a way, this extra information heightens the sense of the simultaneous: at the precise moment that I am engaged with a thing, someone else, remarkably, is invariably concentrating on something different--moving toward some other end.

Perhaps it should not surprise me, reading an article like this one, that technology is catching up with my vision. Oh, it may be that expectations of privacy will refuse to bend as far as realtime, synchronous updates--but the precedent is set, and privacy has yielded to convenience before. Not just in geolocation, but in many other ways, the advancement of technology will continue to change the way we live, work, love--in brief, what it means to be human. Web 2.0, whatever that means, decreasing bandwidth rates, and increasing processing power are all coalescing into something big. What will be the effects on our emotional lives? On our spiritual lives?

Twitter is already becoming incomprehensibly popular on the strength of people's desire to answer and have answered the question, "What are you doing?"

Indulge me: Where are you?