Monday, April 12, 2010

Tied up tightly in the net

Imagine older times, you don’t even have to go back that far. Knowing someone, being together and sharing each other, then going apart, breaking up. In times before ever present internet, before the permanent communication and sharing of (insignificant) news on social platforms. How easy it was to go apart and be apart, get a healthy distance. When you weren’t with a person and could, in fact, be without that person.

Today, the easily woven networks and connections keep reminding you of every person, if you want it or not. The curious mentality of befriending people virtually, being an easy click and so very often made without almost any connection in the real world. Unfriending however seems like an impossible step, a real attack. One can, in some areas, select to hide people, but then still one is far from achieving anything like social silence or even distance from anyone one wants.

So this means, instead of being able to busy oneself with ones’ life as usual and other things, one has to develop the ability to quickly and radically cope with that change of relationship, not only in and about oneself but also about the other. Because rather sooner than later, you’ll be witness to that other’s new activities and relationships. Instead of growing a distance slowly, in some secret garden with tea, lush green solitude and English garden furniture, one remains tied in the net and force fed all those meanings and all those meaninglessnesses.

I, for one, have no effective means of dealing with this. Maybe you do? Suggestions are always welcome…