I'm a little scared sometimes about how much I rely on the internet. I'm
not sure why, since I don't have similar anxieties about other kinds of
infrastructure, like plumbing or electricity (right now in my apartment
the water is off for maintenance reasons and I am feeling pretty relaxed
about it). Maybe there's a greater sense of how easily it could be taken
away and what that would mean. That thought gets me thinking about what
life would be like if I relied on the post office and phone system to
fulfill the needs that the internet regularly fulfills for me.
My conception of the internet is still very much anchored in the sorts
of metaphors catalogued in
How to Internet. I think of it spacially- as a place, but also as an overlapping Venn diagram of intersecting
but compartmentalized communities and selves and ways to behave. It's
also a flow- I play enough online games and stream enough media to see
it that way- as both a particle and a wave. It's also a material
necessity, (in isolation) more than ever.
