human after all

I live in a typical share house. So typical, in fact, Lonely Planet featured it a few months ago as illustrative of classic Surry Hills share house accommodation and applauded my flat-mates and my coordinated outdoor lounges. You can check it out if you like, the author totally trashed my incredible neighbours claiming their more disheveled porch decor was somewhat representative of the inhabitants within (I am sure they don't ever read this blog. In fact, no one does, according to Google analytics. But that is another issue entirely.)

Living in a share house often distracts you from the loneliness it is easy to feel as a single girl in a big busy city - people are always coming and going, cooking, smoking on the porch, stealing wireless broadband... but not tonight. Tonight my house was eerily still. I cooked risotto, had a glass of red wine, watched some TV... and still nothing. No one. It was really weird.

Rather than endure an episode of Good News Week and the awfully tiring Paul McDermott I brushed my teeth, tucked myself into bed, put on the new Sigur Ros album and picked up my laptop.

Days will pass where most of my communication is through a computer or over the phone. Do you think there will be a point at which all communication dismisses the directness of touch and is entirely based on viral, virtual connectedness? That worries me. Yet, here I am, currently perpetuating the system I am so wary of. I'm not saying it's an entirely bad thing, most of my work is web based and many of my relationships are enriched and maintained through the instantaneousness of online social networking. But if people stop actually meeting and touching one another, that would be really sad.

I don't mean to attempt rhetoric or claim any enlightened position, I actually get quite muddled and uncharacteristically self-conscious when I try and discuss the anxieties I have surrounding online social interaction and modern loneliness. But when people can create personalities for themselves and write autobiographical chronicles online to exist without question, when days go by when people don't actually touch anyone else, when you shop/eat/chat/watch/listen/live online, and when the most emotive experience you get all day comes from a mainstream Hollywood'esque television program... I don't know... you just gotta wonder...