On Rural Social Networking

I am writing from the wilderness. I am connected to you by a 28000bps thread of hope. There is no cellular coverage here, in the place I am, wherever that is. The place I am is a yawning chasm in Google Maps. Is it even possible for you to imagine what that’s like to be surfing at a top speed of 28000bps? For a start, it mocks the word “Surfing.” What you’re doing is floating, miles out at sea, hoping that the tide will slop you inch by inch towards an island in the distance. 13000 to 28000bps is like waiting for a glacier to download, and then, just as the glacier is almost done, an elderly Inuit gentleman steps out of a cave and goes, “You have been disconnected. Sorry.” The glacier resets, the man goes back inside.

Being back in the country is nothing like I imagined. I thought teams of rustic locals would arrive at my door bearing whole pigs and casks of home-stewed cognac, or to invite me to a pagan barn orgy. But no. I’m back in the place I grew up and rediscovering a complex network that through the years has continued to evolve without me, and without regard for what I might have done or become in the time since I left. Though I might imagine it occasionally pausing over its cup of gumboot tea to say, “I wonder whatever happened to that Matthew,” it in fact has no real curiosity about the things outside its daily motions. In much the same way as we run back to our social networking services after an absence, eager to see if anyone has queried our lack of tweets or status updates, I longed to see some evidence of my having been missed here. But delightfully, there wasn’t any. A social networking system is not designed to register the missing. And yet the reason that the phenomenon is so addictive is precisely because we believe it knows our absence.

This post took 12 minutes to write and 14 to upload.