I have many happy memories of being young and foolish. I don't have any idea if I was actually happy back in the days of my youth: but looking back--from the perspective of a wiser person who has lived the joys and sorrows of the life that intervened--looking back has often brought a smile.
At least it did until the Internet came along, and Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Myspace and findanyone.com and now I can actually see the people that brought these smiles to my face, not through the gauze of my imperfect memory, but it the harsh glare of an overhead fluorescent light as if on a Skype call from the past.
I want my old misty, gauzy memories back please.
I want to be unavailable to all these people again, and available to them only in their memories. I don't want to be totally and completely and utterly linked-in with them and their friends and their friends-of-friends and everybody else on the planet.
I don't want to know how they turned out. That's what I like to dream about.
I want this hackneyed uber real realty show out of the foggy, gas-lit recesses of my brain. I want their old faces young again, the way they are in my heart.
Do they have a program for that? The UnLinkedIn, UnBookedFace, the NoSpace but My Memory Space?
You know what I hate most about all this? I'm beginning to sound just like my mother.
Subscribe to Robin Chapman News
3 comments:
Whoa! Not once can I remember anyone lighting off like this on the ever-increasing Borg-like / Matrix-computers-uber-alles surrender of self to the electronic collective conciousness. You have proclaimed yourself a rebel; you refuse to surrender to the link. An electronic Tahrir declaration - I Will Not Be Part of the Hive! Hopefully nobody out of your past webbed your online exposures into an intrusive Robin-hobby, forcing you into the ropes like this; your comment reads like there's one or more un-named parties serving as inspiration. It's OK - let them be your secret, we'll understand. Your defiance of the collective is still as courageously revolutionary as it is subversive. Up onto the ramparts, Robin! PS: An off-topic diversion, if I may. I really like that picture of you on the swing. It brings back memories of watching you interact with Dick Klinger and Craig Walker on Evening. Now I know you were dealing with issues at the time, but they never surfaced. This is the Robin we saw - cute as the dickens, bringing light and life to the set and with a twinkling wit.
I'm with Jack here. Not only is there something disturbing about the exhibitionistic nature of facebook, and all that interconnectedness, I have to add that I am disturbed by the ever bigger bigness of television screens. Who needs a cooking show or some program from the history channel the size of the wall in your den? I must be the only person who thinks of Fahrenheit 451 every time I see a bigger TV screen to hang on the wall and dominate the room.
Still cute as the dickens. Do you still have that swing?
Post a Comment