One section of last week's reading of Fred Turner's From Counterculture to Cyberculture talked about how we live on the Internet. Our generation of people are getting busier and we are all over the place. Some people are constantly moving from place to place never really having a solid address. Esther Dyson's quote, "I live on the Net," is so true. Like many of us today, "It's the medium I use to communicate with many of my friends and colleagues." The Internet has become the one place where people can be contacted no matter where they are.
I myself connect with this statement. For one thing, I'm in college now. I no longer live at home. My address is no longer what it was three weeks ago. Now it's something new. And it will be my address for a time, but then break will roll around and I'll once again be back home and my address will change once more. And this process will repeat over the course of 4 years. And then the rest of my life will begin and my place of residence will change yet again. It would be quite difficult to give someone a long term address to use to send me mail. However, through all that time, there is one place that you will always be able to find me: the Internet. My email will not change. My usernames on social networks will not change. I will still be very much alive on the Internet. I will still be checking messages and emails coming in. For another thing, I've built up a large group of Internet friends and they've become a large part of my life over the last couple years. The problem is, they live all over the world. They all have different addresses. And every now and then they move. There's no way I could keep track of them all when I wanted to contact them. But I can rely on Twitter and Facebook to send mass messages to all of them if need be instead of writing individual letters to each one and I can connect with them and Skype and have real face to face chats even though they may live across the country. We live on the Internet. That's where we can find each other. And on occasion we may even meet in person, but for the rest of the time, that's how this generation can keep in touch.
John Perry Barlow sums it up perfectly. He says, "I live at Barlow@eff.org. That's where I live. That is my home. If you want to find me, that's the only place you're liable to be able to do it...there really is no way to track me." So often these days we're on the run, always going to different places getting involved in different things. "Home" tends to move around now and then and you can't always rely on a street address to find someone. But if you have an email address or someone's account on a social network such as Facebook, you have a much greater chance of getting a hold of them. Society is raising us to constantly check our emails, and send text messages to our friends. We have to keep up with the times if we want to keep in touch with our friends and family. Earth is a large place full with 7 billion people. They are scattered across 7 continents, but there is one place that they can all come together and live. That place is called the Internet.
