Information technology and togetherness

I've long been a big fan of information technology as a social medium. Not just phones, of course, but the whole range —and none moreso than online communities. I was, if not an innovator, at least an early adopter of email, online communities and forums, chat, newsgroups, web sites, etc. The only thing I lagged in adopting, oddly, was blogs, this one being not even two years old yet.

Like many people, I've made lifelong friends with whom I developed lasting, valued, and robust relationships long before finally getting together FTF (as they say). I even fell in love with my husband before we met in person. (Long before that sort of thing became commonplace and, eventually, a bit tawdry before recovering its respectability.)

These days, people deplore (or say they do, anyway) how kids sit at the keyboard for hours, isolated, even detached, from reality. But in our family, it's actually kind of fun to all be on line at the same time. We chat from separate rooms, draw each other's attention to cool links, discuss the news (and YouTube videos) we happen to see, do ad-hoc research as we find questions we can't answer, tell and send jokes, encourage each other via our blogs (and public encouragement, in writing, is a very powerful thing) — in short, it rather draws us together in real life than otherwise.

So I'm all for it. Vive l'informatique!