Be Here, Links

The world is so damn tiny. Theresa knows a bunch of the social psychologists quoted in that Po Bronson article...and Emily (second article) is an old friend from the English Dept. at NYU.

(Having typed that comment, it seems like information interesting to perhaps myself alone. But in the spirit of archiving my life, of joining in the mass narcissism described in Emily's article [and thus proving that even nearly-forty-year-olds can play] I shall hit the button anyway).

New York is just a big country town, isn’t it.

I suppose that second article does have a point in as much as I still have an older generation’s reluctance to plaster this site with photos of myself; but any absolute sense of privacy (apart from DOB, national insurance number and so on) went out the window years ago, and I’m not sure I ever had it. I don’t know if that’s a web instinct as much as a writer’s instinct, though.

It does get annoying to always be classed as too old to be a digital native (which comes up a lot in the e-learning literature). I was sending emails at the age of fourteen, dammit, and met my first online friend in the flesh at sixteen. Okay, there wasn’t a website announcing my birth, but we had digital watches! With red LED displays that came on only when you pressed a button on the side!

The first article prompted some personal reflection, too. I hope I’ve avoided the worst of the praise culture, having parents a few years older than the boomers, but on the other hand I did give up learning the guitar at age sixteen after a few months because it would have taken me at least two years to get any good, and because I’d never be as good as Mike Oldfield...