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July 21, 1998
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There's an article about web cams in today's Boston Globe. For some reason the paragraph headlined "A virtual life", quoting Chris Lockhart of www.chriscam.com struck me as hilariously funny and troubling at the same time:
I just want to know, is it a two way camera? Exactly how does being viewed by strangers constitute "going out and having a good time" ? I admit I haven't viewed his site, but how interactive can it be? A substitute for a social life? Too weird. What is a life? What then is a virtual life? I dunno, I just can't get into what I wanted to write about here. When I left the corporate high-tech world, I made sure to get myself an e-mail account and a rudimentary web page so I wouldn't lose touch with "the real world". By "real" I mean the world where people work at computers in cubicles and go out to lunch or dinner with their co-workers. That's where most of my friends were at the time. I feared if I didn't have a web presence, most people would just write me off as having dropped off the planet. I wasn't trying to substitute a low-maintenance virtual life for a real one. Quite the opposite. I left the high-tech world to get my hands dirty, relate to people, animals, and things in a concrete way. I do get my hands dirty. I do relate to animals in a concrete way (especially greenheads :-) ) . I don't know if my relationships with people have improved. I certainly spend way more time with family members, and I have this whole new circle of friends who loaf their souls in Starbucks, but there is still something missing. And a web camera is not going to solve it. |
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