Facebook is a fascinating phenomenon
along with all its equivalents:
Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr,
even WordPress and Blogspot.
All these so-called social networks
which allow you to build a self,
carefully constructed with text
to share with other shadow people
wandering a digital landscape,
plugged into a personalised news feed.
It’s a little worrying, I think,
how lost we can get in
so vast a web of words,
how Whatsapp and Viber
have overtaken our ability
to communicate face-to-face
while Facebook reminds us to
bid half-hearted happy birthdays
to people we barely talk to.
Us youth, digital natives of the net
with technology in our pockets
that transcends time and distance,
generation of iPhone therefore I am,
who will have our very sight
connected to the world wide web
through small contact lenses.
What will we make of all the
shadow people, ideal projections
and shallow internet chatter?
We can so easily drown in
such a flood of fluid networks,
but the ability the net provides
to learn and link to others has
set off an exponential explosion
in the ways we can now share.
It’s no mistake that we call a
conversation with links a ‘thread’:
a small piece of the tapestry
we weave with digital fingers.
There is freedom to weave as
you please and, if done well,
we can find the occasional
golden thread where we would
never have thought to look for it,
be it in a flamenco song or,
nerdy as it might make me,
a simply brilliant maths proof,
both reminders of the beauty
to be found in everything.
Im gonna make those
last few lines my status.
l8r 🙂