Sunday, June 01, 2003 9:22:07 AM Joe Coluccio

The internet is high contact not high content.

A paraphrase of something that I heard via KQED's on air streaming internet feed. I dislike curt statements of this type that with subtle manipulations by the author create a whole all encompassing worldview that solves everything well into the next millennium, but I have to admit, often as not, there is something to them.

There is something high contact about the internet.

And content, which is, without doubt, lacking, may turn to be quite different than any we can imagine.

Web Logs (Blogs) are a cross between an internet home page and an autobiography or diary. They have grown from just a few five or so years ago to upwards of half a million. A lot of disparate souls desperate for communications in the electronic wilderness. I admit freely that I am one of them. And the contact over the couple years that I have been bloging is interesting.

I have come to be “in touch" with:
Two lost school friends, one from high school and one who lived two doors away from me in the "Larimar Avenue" section of Pittsburgh when we were in Kindergarten through the 2nd Grade. A school mate who I don't recall meeting other than passing in the hallways of Penn Senior High School (I've looked in the year book) but who was apparently touched enough by my writing to email me. My ninth grade English teacher who I wrote about in an earlier entry. One of the authors of a book about Shakespeare that I mentioned in another entry. The daughter of a friend who wondered some about her father's early years. And several more that that I will not mention here because I have not become reacquainted via this "blogging" effort, but are equally delightful to me and directly related to contact by means of the internet.

I cannot express in words and images satisfying enough the ecstasy of that high contact and what it has meant to me. What was it called in the dopey sixties and seventies, "a contact high"? Breathing in the new bytefilled "smoke" of the world wide web.

In earlier blog entries I have stated (as well as to anyone who would sit long enough to listen) that the primary use a computer is to amplify intelligence. I tackle tasks now that I would have found impossibly daunting precomputer. And have pointed out that at present I have little interest in artificial intelligence. Some AI could be a species dangling anew on the chain of survival. Our next rival for the new world order may be an enhanced wide slice bagel toaster. When it comes time to be sensitive to the cycles of, say, my washing machine, I will be there, as always, with waves of empathy, but for now I discount appliances and modes of transportation as places to spend my psychic tokens. There are those who would take issue with me and would also point out that the use of AI should not be limited to utility. I never claimed I was Nostradamus. The only seering I do is in a frying pan and I like the surprise that comes from discovery not fortune telling.

Therefore

I was taken completely unaware by the kind of linking that I would find via the world vast internetwork. As I sit here and think it takes my breath away. I get up in the morning go to work. Spend my day at something diverting that hopefully has some meaning beside earning the "greenbacka dollah". Struggle home in the funk of high drive traffic, write (in the backyard when the weather allows), drink a glass or two of some wine that was on sale at the State Store, read, and often as not am in bed by 9 or 9:30 PM. I see my extended family on holidays. Lackzoom meets once a week. I seldom see my children (except for my son who lives with me; come to think of it, I seldom see him either). It is the life of a monk, a hermit, a recluse. A Boo Radley kind of existence. Yet I feel close to all you. This blog contains the objects that I leave in the knot of the tree and the nearness I feel is a direct result of the "high contact" of the internet.

I always thought a great name for a drink would be a Tequila Mockingbird. Absinthe, wormwood and moonflowers? Contact!