It is a typical midsummer evening in Montgomery County. The sun has gone down on another hot, humid, and hazy day; yet in the dusk the temperature has started to go down, and the grass is a lush green, thanks to the rain we have gotten lately.
My pup Angel and I enter the pathway, a shaded tunnel on the side of our house, and turn right at the corner of our fence, emerging into the common area. A couple of deer lift their white tails and bolt into the woods. Fireflies rise from the grass like a multitude of the glowing, fervid souls of the redeemed, resurrected in the rapture at the sound of the final trumpet.
This is the physical world, and I love it. Its extreme temperatures become difficult for me to live with in midsummer and the bitter winter, but I try not to complain. In all too short a span of time the lush greens will fade, the air will turn crisp, and then freeze. Those who complain now about the heat will soon complain about the cold.
But there is another world laid over the physical part of our existence – another part of the person who is Kathy Long. Theories of our being describe humans as a dichotomy or a trichotomy, depending on what religious or philosophical view you espouse. If you believe in an afterlife, when this physical body ceases to function, the light that is Kathy Long will go dark in this world, and we hope that it will flicker into existence in another, better, world. That light is usually referred to as my soul or my spirit. (Or both.)
Humans are developing in yet another way. With the advent of the Internet, and in particular the Social Web, we have integrated another component into our being.
I first became aware of this phenomenon in the mid-80s, when I became involved with a few online communities. Each of these was fairly isolated from the others, not yet linked together by the "Internet". Depending upon my activities in a given community, I became known as an entity that was separate from (but somewhat the same as) the real-life Kathy Long.
In the community where I was the most active, I took the persona of "ByteSize", and quickly realized that I could present myself however I saw fit. ByteSize may or may not have been very much like Kathy Long, depending on how much of myself I wanted to reveal. The important idea was that in this digital incarnation, people didn't first see a thirty-something stay-at-home mother of two who ran her own business from home. Rather, I was known online for my ideas, and my ability to express them. Therein lay a great deal of personal liberation.
A friend of mine in this group referred to himself as "a telecommuning soul", and even now this label appeals to me. I still find that some of my deepest and most enduring relationships are carried on via the Social Web and the Blogosphere.
And this was prior to Facebook. Prior to the Internet unifying these various "online services" and enabling them to talk to each other. Forgive me if this sounds "too cool for school" but I was involved in online communities long before Facebook was a twinkle in Mark Zuckerberg's eye.
A man by the name of Nicolas Carr has recently written a book entitled "The Shallows", whose main premise is that the Internet is re-wiring our brain circuits. The main gist of his argument is that our activity on the Internet is damaging our minds.
There are others who feel that there is only a change in the way our mental circuits process information, as the brain constantly changes and adapts to our every experience. And this change isn't a bad thing. One of these is Tom Stafford, a lecturer in Psychology and Cognitive Science at the University of Sheffield, UK. To the question "Does the Internet change your brain?", he responds that everything we do changes our brains, including making a cup of tea, and it's not anything to worry about.
So put your mind at ease.
Our lives have a new dimension. We exist in the physical world; the world of the soul; and now also the world of bits and bytes. And maybe the Kathy Long you see on the Social Web or the Blogosphere is a better representation of her true self, as thoughts and feelings fly free of the strictures of the physical world.
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