Backwards

I spent an hour this afternoon tinkering with a blogroll - adding a page to my blog filled with names from the present and past - most of them still here, some of them not. I’m sure more names will come to mind over the days ahead.

While digging through email, and through the wayback machine in a largely fruitless search for blogrolls from the distant past, I happened upon several friends I had lost touch with over the years. One conversation in particular - four years ago - was about just that - losing touch. We promised to each other that we would try. We obviously failed.

I couldn’t help thinking about the “river” analogy once again - that each of us is kind of like a leaf flowing down-stream - sometimes floating alongside others - sometimes drifting away. Sometimes you see the same leaves again - sometimes you don’t. There’s a part of me that immediately wonders if we have any agency in it - if the whole coming together and drifting apart is predetermined or not.

I wonder if the pile of ZIP disks sitting on the shelf opposite me hold any secrets? I’m pretty sure the first incarnation of “Thought Cafe” sits on them - the first website I built, back in the late 1990s.

Every idea was new back then. I remember “Web 2.0” being talked about endlessly - and numerous websites sprouting as the world wrestled with how this “internet thing” might be used - or how we might twist it, bend it, and manipulate it into forms nobody had thought of yet.

I suppose in many ways the arrival of the “social” internet was inevitable really. It still makes me smile that there’s nothing inherently “social” about the “social” internet. If you throw a thousand strangers into a walled garden in the middle of nowhere, that doesn’t make it or them “social” at all really. Quite the opposite probably.

Anyway. It’s getting late, and I’m rambling.

And yes, I’m avoiding the arrival of tomorrow. I’ve played this game before. I think I’m quite good at it. The clock has a different opinion.