lily's blog

I read that the blog is dead, killed by social networking.
It is true, I write more there now than to you.
The need for that connected to my peers feeling
is stealing my stream of thought alone.
The places where I shone, and felt at home.

The potential for adventure is greater than ever!
Right now, I am this close to completing
to enabling a mode that is entreating
me to return to a much different way.
Including what I say, and where I say it.

The digital world is getting bigger all the time, in a way much like any village becomes a city. It used to be like living in a small town; if something dumb happens it seems like *everyone* knows and reminds you about it forever. This is why you dont get naked on the internet, it's just like public. The adage that once something is on the internet its there forever may always be mostly true, but as it grows, more happens, and more of it becomes anonymous against the total volume. In any big city, the chances of stumbling across a random naked person is much higher than a small town, in part because people feel some anonymity in large numbers, and partly because the density of people increases your odds.

The sheer numbers of people connected is staggering compared to ten years ago, or five years ago, and we are ever finding more ways for people to add bits to the data pool. Digital monuments are being erected, and we are surprised to see any large domain go away, sometimes taking with them these sites of interest, as a developer might clear an old section of town. The New Frontier is becoming established lands. We are now adjusted to the idea that the digital world will always be here, that someone somewhere will be employed to keep the lights on, and the webservers up. Comfortable enough to stake our entire culture and government on it. We feel strongly enough about the permanence and importance of this territory to even fight wars in and about it.

A generation ago this world did not exist. We could only see it in terms of the world we knew, the analog world, and shaped it accordingly. Now people are raised living in it from birth. They know it and use it as naturally as a previous generation knew playing in the yard. Their visions of what the digital world can become is bounded only by the tools they make for themselves, and the environment we leave behind.