The unshareable brightness of fleeing

I presume that Second Life was created to make money rather than to address metaphysical philosophy, but I think Milan Kundera's famous book is based on the pain of not having another life in which the consequences of our decisions can be played out. But he wrote it before we had the internet!

OK, so Facebook is not a Second Life. But neither is it really integral to my First Life. Some people who are very closest to me are not here. And I can't imagine keeping this place updated with my status daily or weekly, let alone hourly. Yes, it is a great way to keep in touch with friends. But it is still a little like a wall to keep yourself in, as well as to reach yourself out.

Obviously I'm not talking about bricks and mortar. From 1979 I used to think a wall was a barrier behind which you could stay comfortably numb from the cruel world outside. Now a wall is just a convenient place for everybody to write their graffiti. That's fine .. go ahead :)

In the beginning

This might look like my first note here, but I have had this account here since 2004. I even wrote and published my first personal web page more than ten years ago.

More recently I started writing occasional notes to Myspace but I'm not currently planning to port them to here. I guess that will remain as a permanent record of my worldview as it was during a few months of early 2007, in the same way that somewhere in web archives is a permanent record of my worldview as it was during a few months of early 1997.

But I'm not going back there. I've lost my original handwritten page, and Myspace is an ugly, noisy, bug-ridden cluttered mess. I did my best to keep my page simple and clean, but the general environment still looks like a space for teenagers. It's sad that facebook is gradually going the same way, but once again my page hopes to stay as an oasis of calm.

So no poncy add-in applications here - to reuse a friend's phrase, I guess that I'm just a simple usability bitch.