Complex Numbers

November's End

I've been hanging around on the internet for a long, long time.

While I can't say I was an early adopter, I was browsing newsgroups and visiting websites at some point before 1995. I don't recall exactly when. One of the first things I got into was IRC, which had bugger-all to do with the World Wide Web, but it was social media before social media was even a thing.

I chatted with a lot of people there, most of us hiding behind aliases for our own protection. I even met some of them "IRL," as we called it. Some of them are still my friends.

"IRL" was early webspeak for "In Real Life." There was, then, this sense of separation between meatspace and cyberspace, that anything that happened online didn't really count.

I knew better from the beginning.

These people I spoke with were just that - people. No different from the folks I'd meet in my job or activities, except that they were spread out all over the world. While the internet wasn't as ubiquitous then as it is now, it was widespread enough so it wasn't just other people from the US that I'd be talking to.

That, to me, was the draw. I think a lot of people go on the net looking for like-minded individuals - and there's nothing wrong with that; I do it as well - but I was always open to another perspective, possibly from people completely different from me.

Inevitably, I'd find that they weren't so different, after all. At least, we could find some common ground. Age, gender, race, nationality, sexual identity, religion, favorite sports team, whatever - all that becomes secondary to who the person is.

Now, it's often different. People identify themselves by how they fit into these categories. That's okay, but it does focus on what separates us rather than on what unites us.

It seems to me that everyone wants to be unique in some way. That's easy enough if you've only got a few other people around. When I was in high school, I was one of about 300 in my graduating class, 1200 total in the school. I went to university and I was but one out of 20,000. After that, when competing for jobs, I was one of 40,000.

On the internet, I'm one of 7 billion. And so are you.

Excelling in a milieu like that is tantamount to winning a lottery. It's not just a matter of not being a big fish in a small pond; it's more like being a piece of plankton floating in the Pacific.

So there's this tension - a sense of competitiveness. A pull between wanting to be unique and wanting to fit in. This woman has 20,000 Tweeter followers. This man's YouTube channel has 50,000 subscribers. What can the rest of us do except follow along?

I figured out early on that there's nothing that I can do that someone else hasn't already done, and better than I could possibly do it. Nothing I can say that hasn't already been said, in a more elegant or satisfying manner. Nothing I can invent that someone else hasn't already patented and started making money on. No jokes that haven't already been told to death. And nothing I can write that would ever stand out amidst the teeming billions of writers.

The best I can hope for is to connect with someone, occasionally. And I'm okay with that. So thanks for reading, and - specifically addressing this to others in the November blog challenge - thanks for writing. I'm supposed to cite one new fact I've learned about a fellow blogger this month. Incidentally, just to see if you're actually reading this, anyone who comments on this entry before the end of today based on website time will get a season ticket chosen at random. Just throwing that in here as a thanks for reading this far. So anyway, one new fact about a fellow blogger?

That's tough, because, as with the early days I mentioned above, I've learned a lot of things about a lot of people. I don't think I really knew most of you other bloggers before this started; of course, I don't think I really know you now, apart from what you've chosen to show us in your writing. If I mention one author, or a few, I feel like I'm shafting the others. But mentioning everybody would be an even more daunting task. Just know that I've appreciated reading all of the different entries and seeing everyone's perspective on things.

So I don't even want to tag anyone here; therefore, I'm not going the {user:name} route. If I have to call out just one person, I'll make it pwheeler. She and I are obviously very different (well, except for the cat thing), and yet I've learned a few things from her entries, notably about food. And food, as you know by now, is one of my favorite things, as long as it isn't too healthy.

Just another example of finding commonality, I suppose. We could do with more of that. Arguments and debates have their place, of course, but in the end, aren't we all just people trying to make our way through the crowd? Don't answer that - someone's bound to say "no, some of us are lizard aliens from Antares 7" or something.

That someone is usually me, so I'm nipping that right in the bud.