The small Internet
It’s good to be choosy about your digital neighbors.
Original publication link: The small Internet
“Sometimes, if you want to change a man’s mind, you have to change the mind of the man next to him first.”
— Megan Whalen Turner
A recent email exchange prompted this thought:
I like the Internet better as a bunch of neighborhoods.
The people I stay close to on the interwebs are my neighbors.
Internet neighbors!
Internet neighborhoods are better than real-life neighborhoods because we can all create our own individual neighborhoods and each person’s individual neighborhood can exist entire, overlap with others, and still not conflict with each other.
It can even be one-sided: you can be in my neighborhood, even if I’m not in yours.
Because digital existence is an other-dimensional existence, removed from those old-fashioned space-time limitations.
We each get to create our own small Internet.
My neighborhood includes
- close neighbors: they become friends, over time.
