Mudhouse :: Blog :: Family 2.0

Family 2.0

posted by Kyle Jeffries on December 01, 2007

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Well, I titled and subtitled this entry before I had considered its actual content (which seems so very blog to me). So anyone expecting some kind of heavy post-Post meditation on family and technology may be disappointed. Apologies. . .

I was excited to see that my maiden blog generated three comments, then I discovered that they were all from family (I hereby confer honorary 'Auntie' status to Deb). But rather than feeling some kind teen-ish 'gawd, mom' embarrassment or resentment, my romantic heart was set a-thump by their digital pat on the back. The praise was effusive and hyperbolic, as though I had composed some kind of Gettysburg Address for the digital era or something. I got nostalgic: remembering Mom and Dad at high school wrestling meets unflagging in their support even as I was pinned again and again. (Has anyone out there ever smelled a wrestling mat up really close? It's a weird smell.)

As my inner Luddite is slowly absorbed into the hyper-reality I'm starting to realize the deeper truth of human interaction: rather than technologies co-opting our emotions, our emotions adapt to incorporate new means of expression. (I'm sure McLuhan's written about this somewhere.) Which is why, I suppose, that those three comments could mean as much to me as a hug or an arm over the shoulder after one of those disastrous wrestling matches. And like so many families, ours is dispersed across the geography of this nation like so many dandelion seeds on the winds of the American Dream (overwrought prose- sue me). So given that distance, why wouldn't I gladly accept the digital compression of space/time so that we (myself, Mom, Melissa, Auntie Deb) could be there, in 1s and 0s, sharing a timeless group hug? The better question is why would I post what is essentially an personal email to my fam (i.e. Thanx for the comments! Love ya!) on a public forum? I guess I've already internalized more of internet culture than I will allow myself to admit. (My inner Luddite is waving red flags right now.) Is this the point of the whole cyber-shebang: a deconstruction of public v. private domains? A digital tribalism beyond geography (and here I take freely from McLuhan)? Is this the promise of the new wired world? Or are we simply turning over more of our basic human nature (whatever that is) to an infrastructure which is still basically controlled by a small number of corporate entities? Okay, I have to rein this in, I'm starting to sound like 'The Matrix' now. Two double Americanos have loosed me from the moorings of bloggerly restraint. What was intended to be nothing more than a shout out to Mom, et al, has become a self-absorbed, simplistic, and pseudo-philosophical river of stream-of-consciousness. Or, synonymously, a blog entry. Yikes.

(parenthetical post script: i realize that this sort of meta-blog is likely played out on so many levels. but i'm still processing this business of computers-in-my-life in a way that all you ituners and facebookers and youtubers have resolved long ago. (and all this self-referential explanation is in itself a trope that has worn out its welcome (and even this apology for employing the worn out trope of the self-referential explanation of meta-blogging or what have you has been done to death (and since i'm pretty much appropriating dave eggers right now, i'll follow it to its logical conclusion: here is a picture of a stapler.))))