while i’m trying to ground myself here in finland, settle in something like a physical universe, locality and so on… the virtual reality keeps developing.
what am i talking about? to start with, the facebook. i’ve been pretty anti-facebook, but i decided to give it a try. so now i’m on it. not hooked yet, but i decided not to touch it during work and i have been adding friends and am concidering joining networks and groups – beyond the colchester peace campaign. it’s soooo exciting to see familiar faces from years and miles away, and find out how and where they are. now, in this intertextuality of the web, i wonder if facebook meets my blog.
and beyond facebook there’s linkedin and the hungarian iwiw. one of my friends friends contacted me recently as he thought i’m in berlin, and since we have a friend in common, we could meet. but the programme hadn’t updated my location, even though i tried it already, so he had wrong info. anyways, the mutual friend has over 600 “friends” in this iwiw networking programme. and that’s in no way abnormal. it seems pretty common to declare a contact with everyone one had ever met in one’s life. it becomes a bit counter-productive. i tried to see who else is friends with my friend and realised how pointless it was to deal with this mass of people.
second, having an office at the university means that i’ll be bumping into colleagues in corridors and meeting people on the streets in the maze of a centre campus on helsinki. but now with the web – and the fact that people (especially those who have offices and even more those who do not have work but do have a good internet connection) actually use it – being present and connected exchanging ideas, how-you-are-s, culture, even doing politics is not limited to the locality. while having your coffee in the privacy of your workspace, you may have an equal number of refreshing encounters as in a coffee room. sometimes these may even be more effective, exciting or thorough than those in the coffee room. other times the human tough, being physically there helps. in some ways i find it super exciting, in other ways a bit scary.
perhaps we do not need a locality anymore? i’ve been joking that if i could have my library in an electronic form i wouldn’t mind having the mobile academic life that i’ve been leading, with only a few months in one country, city and institute at the time.
also, i’m in touch with people in my home city via skype or messenger. now perhaps even more often than when i was away. does it mean that the local is universalising away – disappearing into the virtual supralocal reality? would that indicate that the local really matters, and that in fact while using the tools that ought to be designed to talk to those who live far away, i’m precisely cherishing the local, and even putting it over the global.
on the other hand, i’m really not the best person to be talking about the local – as for me local has always been plural, intense and even a short experience (despite its long-lasting effects). i’m yet to discover how it feels to be living in a place for longer than 14 months. actually, that’s precisely what i’d love to do (even if it were painful).
but now, as i told inna who was skyping from belarus, i need to put my wrist at rest. i’m seeing a doctor tomorrow about it – today was a heavy day as the teaching started and i was having to lift and copy heavy books. don’t worry it’s not the RSI – i hit my wrist when i was twisting my angle on friday night at juha’s summer cottage. the angle fared better than the wrist. so, i’m not even starting to comment the second life here. i’m not in it. this life, with it’s many sub-lifes, is enough.
but at least i now have, in theory, a more fixed locality where to fill my time (until now the time has only been sucked by constant travelling, meeting, socialising, suriving, packing, you name it, which obviously has not been all that bad, but…).