Why So Hidden?

February 29th, 2008

With the proliferation of the internet, you would think that more and more people would be communicating. I remember a time when the internet was new and fresh, and people were talking to each other, building websites, and using that as a form of communication unlike anything ever was done before. However, it seems that today no one wants to talk to each other, and instead we are stuck in circles with the same group of friends in the same towns,cities, and internet world, without anything interesting to say.

Case in point: AIM.

My aim account has 56 screen names, and often times half of the names are online and doing stuff. However, if I don’t initiate contact days, weeks, months, and for some names, years go by without as much as a hello. However, back in high school, I was the bone-afide hustler, going on makeoutclub.com and scoping aim names, talking to the ladies, and genuinely meeting more people than I did in real life. (Growing up in los angeles didn’t make it easy to meet people...everyone is so afraid of each other)

But then I grew up.

I never got out of the internet job world, I stay online for at least 18 hours a day with my aim running, hoping that someone somewhere will see my name lit up and would say hello, engage me in a conversation about anything, anything at all!

Instead, people pass by each other on the information super highway, just like they passed me by in high school, and just like they passed me by in college. Now I sit in a cubicle in the heart of seattle, programming websites for clients that don’t even care to know my name, and all I have to communicate with the outside world is my aim name...and a computer.

No one cares though…

we don’t care about each other, and we don’t have time for anymore aim friends.

But wait, there’s more!

I have 4,000 myspace friends...when’s the last time I heard from any of them?

I recently moved to Seattle, Wa. I have no friends here.

Every attempt at saying hello has been greeted with a face of disgust, or fear that I’m going to steal from them.

They talk about tolerance, but I find that the world doesn’t tolerate a Mexican saying hello to them, unless we are serving their meals, cleaning their tables, or sitting a counter...the clerks life...I miss it.

I hate the way the internet has made people more introverted than ever. It wasn’t suppose to be that way....

So I sit here, on hour 38 of my 40 hour a week job....wishing that someone would recognize that I’m still alive...barely hanging on.

Darn...I just spilled my drink.

*Written by sirjorge for FFAF.

  Free for All Friday   permalink   2 comments   10:23 AM