Glass, I've decided, is the reason that we have this space between "us" and "them". Glass helps us pretend that what's happening to someone else isn't real. We touch the glass ... cool, firm, sharp and able to cut us if mishandled ... and decide it's the real deal.
And then something happens behind the glass that melts it, pulls you back into that big blue room again. No camera, no window, no TV. Just you and the nerve-endings of another living creature.
Nice new job, lots of research. RSS and blogging is the topic du jour; how we can use these to deliver services to our library customers. So I'm researching blogs, finding stuff. And I find this:
"A 19-year-old man and his sister were murdered in New York, and his last weblog entry (under Xanga), written while the perpetrator was in the house, helped in identifying the killer. http://yclipse.typepad.com/yclipse_tech_journal/"
The world comes rushing in. Follow all the links; you get to the original person's blog. I don't know why it was such a shock to see the actual post ... I guess I was expecting a virtual police tape around it ... something like "This post has been removed for police investigation". Which is, of course, silly. Instead the evidence is there ... we can touch it. Suddenly, it's real. Suddenly, over 1000 complete strangers read the post and contribute expressions of sympathy, of shock, of horror, as the real world invades our nice virtual lives.
Suddenly, the glass melted ...
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