Daily status: the DJI has dropped 2,620 points since the bailout passed on October 3rd. Your Federal tax dollars at work!
I feel... isolated. Which is odd, since I just had three people over for a board game party yesterday and I've been re-connecting with people via Facebook.
Or is it because I've been reconnecting with people? So many have gotten married, had children, changed jobs, even just graduated from college! Effectively none of the people I spent those critical years with are still the people I knew then.
I've been thinking a lot lately of the modern mobile society. We grow up, then we move to go to college, and in many cases we move on from there to someplace else. We think nothing of driving half an hour and a dozen miles to work, and we don't get to know our neighbors. We chat online with friends we haven't seen face to face in years. We all slowly grow our own circles of friends, which never quite overlap with our old ones. Someone moves and doesn't pass on a phone number or an email address, and it is as if they've vanished from the face of the earth. No one knows where they are, or what happened to them.
I can't help thinking about how we connect with the communities we're in during the digital age. A LOT of the communities I'm part of are electronic; I seldom if ever see the people I talk to there in real life. So, in a real crisis, who do I turn to? The electronic communities won't be there. My friends in other states won't be there. Even my "local" friends are mostly hours away by foot, and in traffic jams probably not much closer by car.
So if it all comes apart, who do I turn to? Who will you turn to?
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2 comments:
You turn to your friends, same as always. Where are your friends? Used to be, if they weren't in front of you, you didn't know. You had to check their hangouts(taking hours to go from place to place), or call and hope they were home. Today, call, and no matter where they are you can talk to them, thanks to cell phones. Sure some catastrophe can take out cell phones, but "Acts of God" always could disrupt communication. Used to be If someone left the state, you couldn't get to them quickly. If I need to, I could be in Arizona(where my parents are)in 20 hours(I just checked) for $200. That's fast enough for any long term emergency. I doubt I could have done that 20 years age, and I KNOW that I wouldn't have be able to casually find that out 20 years ago.
Your point that each of us grows their own circle of friends is true. This is a good thing. It means that you will have the circle of friends you want AND deserve. You really do have a whole world of friends to choose from, and you can keep whomever you are willing to put the time and effort to keep. If you don't put in the effort, you don't keep the friend. About the only thing that has really changed due to the increase in mobility is that no one has a captive circle that can't get away, or that they can't get away from.
Remember, for problem that you need help for in the next three minutes, a friend two blocks away couldn't help you with anyway. Problems with an hour deadline, well, thats me and anyone in the greater Everett area. Problems with a day deadline? That's a third of the US. Two day deadline and you have the whole US, Four days is probably the world.
I do think that the sort of problem that would take out all of the communication and travel options currently available to us would be the same sort of emergency that would make total strangers pull together.(Massive earthquake, Nuclear Holocaust, Zombie Attack Etc.)
Several good points there, Chris. Thanks.
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