you listening, so-called ‘world’?

March 6, 2009

I don’t know about you, but on the internet (web, chat, 2.0, social media, whatever), the “world”  doesn’t seem round. It’s just THERE. Out there. In there. On there. The following terms don’t fit well into internet conversation: around the world, around the globe, the whole world around… you get the idea.

My mind has a tendency to conjure images with every sentence fragment or subordinate phrase; so whenever the word “world” comes up I tend to see either the cool, metal globe from Mrs. Gardner’s third-grade classroom, or the huge canvas screen that hung in Mr. Overweight-with-a-mustache-and-overalls’ eight-grade civics class, printed with the globe stretched out and sliced like a lotus flower. In conversations about on-line life, “world” shows up in my mind as a this infinitely deep bowl of spaghetti, each strand connected to every other one, somehow.

So, on the internet, the world IS different. At least in my little world.

[ image credit: www.studio22sc.com ]