Last night I read this interview with Jennifer Egan, who’s just won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. I haven’t actually read any of her books and I have honestly no idea how this interview ended up being something I was even aware of, let alone actually sat down and read, but anyway there I was, at the kitchen table, staring at my laptop, eating beans on toast and trying not to cry.

I don’t know why I was so taken with it. I think it’s because my initial reaction was, “oh my God, this is ME!”. Which is a ridiculous reaction to have, and not just because I haven’t won a Pulitzer. I mean, almost nothing about our stories is the same. For instance, I don’t live in New York; I’m too neurotic even for New York. I would sit there all day and worry that I was not hip enough for the hipsters and get nothing done. I have actually thought about moving to New York. There are a lot of complicating factors (a lot, a lot) but really what it comes down to when I think about it with any seriousness is this: I can’t imagine ever living anywhere in New York except Brooklyn and I am pretty sure that I am not cool enough (by which maybe I mean self-aware enough) to live in Brooklyn.

Seriously. I have actual, real, physical anxiety about that. And I am not moving to Brooklyn any time soon, so you could say that to worry about it is a total waste of energy, except if you said that you’d have to also say that most of the other things I spend time worrying about (whether my hair looks frizzy, whether my children, if I can even have children, if I’m lucky enough, will be beautiful and intelligent or not, whether I should have bought that pair of shoes last month, whether a stovetop kettle was really the right choice, etc etc) are a total waste of energy – and of course you’d be right, but you’d also be discounting a huge amount of my time. And I’m convinced that there has to be a productive reason for all that energy, that it can be converted into something useful or at least interesting. So I keep generating it.

***

And another thing: I did not have the foresight to go travelling before I went to college, or even to do things at college that would have been intellectually, experientally, worth doing. I don’t mean that I regret what I did at college, but I do mean that I think I put myself at a distinct disadvantage, because I was totally practical: I planned ahead, for the future, or rather, for a specific future, that did not come in the end. I guess it’s because I worry, and in this case I was worried, even if I didn’t realise it at the time, about what would happen after college. I started worrying about this practically before my first day in Boston, which was funny, because I had spent all of high school, and I genuinely mean all of it, looking forward to the day I went to college and got out of this town and finally started my Life!

So of course the moment I started that Life, whatever it was, I totally forgot how much I had been looking forward to it and what I had thought it was going to be like and I started to do the same old boring sensible things I had done in high school, things which I had done purely to ensure that I would get into a good college so that I could start my Life. I guess now I was doing the same old boring sensible things in college so that I could be sure I could get into a good Life? For instance I got a boyfriend and even though I was still only 17 when I met him (yes, this is how much of a hurry I was in to get to college and then subsequently to get out, I was 17 when I started and 20 when I finished) and he was only 19, after a little while, in very vague terms, we sort of formed an imaginary future together.

We never said, “we’re going to get married” but I think, if I’m not very much mistaken, that was the implication. I was the first girl he had ever kissed. I didn’t know this until a few months after our first kiss, though. He’d made up a story about a girl in high school. He really had loved this girl, I think, but they had not had any sort of physical relationship. I found this out at a party one night, drinking bottles of Heineken, which was actually pretty classy for a freshman party, not a keg in sight! I think it must have been in Allston, all the parties were in Allston, in Tardis-like apartments that always seemed bigger on the inside than they appeared on the outside, apartments where inevitably you discovered that someone you sort of knew sort of lived.

At the time it seemed sweet. I think I liked the idea of being that important to someone, I liked the idea of such a terribly old-fashioned kind of relationship. But over time it started to seem to me that 17 was awfully young and that it was probably a shame if you didn’t at least kiss a few different people in your life, and I didn’t much fancy being cheated on, especially not when I was still in my fine youth and running several miles along the Charles River whilst nursing a hangover every morning before class. I mean, what a stupid time to commit! Let alone to be betrayed! So you see how even then I was looking forward: first to our imagined future (a house, an Audi, and a Job, whatever that meant), then to our imagined destruction. Always so awfully practical! Which is not a bad thing, necessarily, just a different thing, and maybe not the best thing for me, because I’m so prone to anxiety, and probably it would have been good for me to have been more irresponsible so that I could see how little control I really had over anything, especially my own self.

***

Incidentally I didn’t even know I was anxious until my junior year in college, when I had been suffering panic attacks for literally years without having a clue what they were. At various points in high school I had considered the possibility that I had cancer, that I might die before the night was over, that I was allergic to caffeine, that this was just what being grown upish was like, that I had gotten too much sun the day before or else too little, that I’d worn the wrong pair of socks to school earlier and now I was being punished, and pretty much everything else you can possible imagine a precocious, obsessive, fundamentally happy but socially isolated teenager thinking.

It was actually my father who diagnosed me. I thought maybe I had eaten something bad because for a few days I had felt nauseous and dizzy at night, but the moment he suggested it might be anxiety and I went online and looked up the symptoms it was like the world had righted itself and I was hungry and fine. So I went to the doctor and presented my diagnosis and he confirmed it without even hesitating, without even really asking any questions. I don’t know if the confidence was mine or his but anyway there we were. We had a label! And maybe it’s coincidence but this also seemed to mark the start of the time I began to act a little more freely, a little more recklessly. I started to do things like giving up a perfectly good paid internship and deciding to go to Oxford for four months where I knew no one and where I met a man on my first night who I would, not very long after, move in with.

***

But then on the other hand I do see (a part of) myself in Egan’s story, because, regardless of what successes I have or have not had and what choices I have (or have not) made, I recognise what it is like to be young and to want to be a writer.

***

There’s a point in the interview where Egan is talking about her first apartment in New York: “It was on West 69th Street, right near the park,” she says. “But who has time to go to the park? I was frantically trying to figure out how to pay the rent, which I think was $400.”

And I thought: well, who does have time to go to the park, after all? I don’t know! I live near parks, I live near some of the best parks I have ever seen in my life. On my first day in Oxford I walked around Christ Church Meadow and I thought I would cry from happiness. I remember seeing all these English-looking girls with messy hair and and blue-and-white striped dresses and beautiful pale legs sitting in the grass reading their books and thinking that if I lived here, I would spend all summer in this place. But here I am, living here. I’m not even frantically trying to pay the rent anymore. But whenever it’s a sunny weekend and I think maybe we should go to the park I get stressed out about the idea of going to the park, about the idea of going somewhere purely to sit there. Who has time for that? So I don’t go and I stay home and write a book instead.

❧

1.

I can never decide about things, really. Every choice feels bigger than it is. For instance, the choice between staying at home, in the garden, reading a book in a the sunshine, or going for a walk along the river, meeting friends and having a cider. Two good options. But as the afternoon cools in preparation for night they both become less good, less ripe; at the centre they start to have the stench of missed opportunity. I spend so much time not deciding that it is often like running and running down a funnel, everything always narrowing, until one day, I suppose, I will wake up and my life will simply be what it is, and there will be no other option.

So choice starts to seem impossible, because it starts to seem so impossibly important. Even to buy a teakettle becomes an arduous exercise, a prolonged ordeal that ends with the purchase of the shiny red one I knew at the start I wanted. But in the hours between deciding emotionally and deciding actually, I trawl through hundreds of options on Amazon: stovetop kettles, electric kettles, electric kettles made to look like stovetop kettles, stovetop kettles made to look like electric kettles, electric kettles that change colour when the water has boiled, electric kettles that double as a washer/dryer, stovetop kettles that are actually time machines. I read reviews of teakettles (reviews. of teakettles.) and discover, for instance, that certain of the stovetop variety are deemed to be clunky and even dangerous. And I am swayed by colour and capacity but also by something harder to categorise: I imagine what this kettle that I might decide to buy says about who I am and the kind of life I have built for myself, I try to choose based on how closely it matches with how I would like to imagine my life looks from afar. I discover it is difficult to imbue a teakettle with so much meaning. But I try my best anyway.

2.

Perhaps it’s because I find it easier to commit in a broader, Romantic Comedy sense. I do not really find it that difficult to say to someone that I want to be with him for ever, that I want a life together, a family, a future, because I do not really overthink that sort of thing, it’s probably the only thing, in fact, that I do not overthink. But I cannot be that intuitive or impulsive when it comes to committing to anything else. I spend literally months agonising about whether or not to buy a certain pair of boots and then one day I suddenly do buy them and I am instantly unsure again, though it doesn’t matter anyway because the purchase is not reversible.

But anyway the issue is never actually do I really want this? It’s always but is there something better out there? Would I find that something better if I just waited?

3.

It’s like my book. Would I find the perfect structure for it if I waited a little longer? I have been thinking that for several years now; I could go on thinking it for several years more, or for forever, and let the project languish simply because of the possibility that there is a possibility it could be better another way.

4.

Then there’s the fact of things moving ceaselessly and constantly forward. It’s so easy to feel left behind, even while you yourself are also moving forward, getting older. Things only ever happen in the same order – in the order they’re happening, in fact. But they also don’t stop. They don’t wait. And I hate to be rushed. I often want to pause everything for a few hours while I catch up. But you can’t do that, and everything of course goes on going forward (irreversibly) – “…till there’s no time left. That’s what time means,” as Tom Stoppard’s Valentine Coverly says.

5.

There’s this book sitting on my bedside table (it’s not particularly significant, there are eighteen books on my bedside table) called What Now? It’s by Ann Patchett, who supposedly “offers hope and inspiration for anyone at a crossroads” (it’s based on a commencement address she gave at Sarah Lawrence College), and I think my mother gave it to me after I graduated from college, but I’m not sure I want to read it; it seems to promise not answers, but more questions, in the guise of “opportunity”. And sometimes I’m not sure I actually want to see the opportunity in “what now”. Sometimes I think I just want to be able to buy a teakettle without having a complex emotional reaction to the shape of its handle and what it means in relation to my life.

❧

First there is the bad thing that happens. Then there are the videos. We live in an age of disaster pornography; we can literally watch the wave rolling in, over and over again. We can see the destruction as it happens, and then relive that moment as often as we can bear, or oftener. I don’t just mean in Japan, of course. I mean everywhere, all the time. Horror is such a part of daily life – not personal horror but horror on a grand scale, a universal scale, a scale such that it ceases to seem horrific, starts to seem ordinary.

Google searches reinforce this sense of helplessness; we see the water sweep away roads, the photograph of a house far out at sea, the cars dwarfed by disaster, driving fast but not fast enough. There is not only nothing we can do because these things are so big, so utterly beyond us – can you swoop down like superman, pluck the house from the sea? – but also because they have already happened. The waves cannot be reversed or the quake contained, the damage undone.

***

I find myself watching The Wonders of the Universe. I have a beer while Brian Cox describes the arrow of time, the inevitable end of everything. “Events always happen in the same order. They’re never jumbled up, and they never go backwards,” he says, watching chunks of ice from a glacier fall into the lake below, then sifting through sand in an abandoned mining town in the Namibian desert. He looks calm when he says these things. I don’t feel calm watching clips on YouTube: aerial shots of the aftermath, “first person raw footage”, though I’m compelled to click on the suggested videos, to keep clicking. And this disaster pornography leads eventually to a climax of complete helplessness.

***

“Calm is only an interval between chaos. Nothing is guaranteed, not even the ground we stand on,” Alain de Botton writes. We see this manifested somewhere else, we take it home, apply it to what we know. We think it gives us perspective. And yet when people say things like, “oh, this really puts things into perspective,” or, “oh, it’s really hard to pity someone who’s dealing with [for example] a mashed potato ‘shortage’ with global events being the way they are,” or whatever, what are they actually saying? I mean, are they saying, ‘no one should complain because someone else always has it harder’? Or, ‘no one who lives in a developed country that hasn’t recently been hit with a natural disaster or ravaged by warfare and has enough, fundamentally, to get by on should complain’?

I think like this too, but only when something big happens, and surely it would be appropriate for us to think like this all of the time. To think, every day, how grateful we should be, how little right we have to complain. Except that what a stupid thing to think. How unlikely that anyone ever could, really, think like that. Not because it isn’t true but precisely because it is true. Precisely because we would soon drown in the waters of our own gratitude; because there is just too much to be grateful for, in the same way that there is just too much to be afraid of.

***

The fact is this: the light of all the stars in the universe will go out someday. But a stubbed toe still hurts. Compassion, even understanding, does not make our own tiny problems any less problematic, though to see a house swept out to sea may allow you to rethink the urgency of these problems. On the 11th of March lots of people on Twitter were saying, “my heart goes out,” “my thoughts are with all those people,” “pray for Japan.” But these are the things we say to console ourselves, not to make things better, they are what we say when we have reached that climax of helplessness.

***

Which is not to say that prayers and thoughts are worthless. Their worth is a very human worth; in the same way that sometimes the way the afternoon lights passes through the trees pleases a passerby for no particular reason, to say, “my thoughts are with them” is to try to connect in a language that does not exist, but can nonetheless be felt. A language of helplessness but also of hopefulness. We are struck by the weight of disaster because we suddenly understand how equal we all are. We watch the videos again and again, we broadcast them and comment on them, precisely because they highlight the vastness of what we collectively do not know, do not expect.

***

Seneca: ‘Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider, not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile.’

***

And yet everything is always unexpected. Our minds cannot meet all the problems; we consider what is wont to happen and what can happen in equal measure, unsure how much time to devote to worrying about each possibility. We remain breakable vessels, bodies weak and fragile. “Perhaps tonight or before tonight will split open the spot where you stand securely” (Seneca again). In California, where I grew up – “a society built on quicksand, where everyone is getting new lives every day,” as the writer Pico Iyer describes it – we were always both worrying and not-worrying about the spot splitting open where we stood securely. It was fires and mudslides mostly; and at night in my dreams I made lists of what to pack and take away with me if we had to evacuate, but I did not live each day in fear, you cannot live each day in fear. Meanwhile our Italian relatives, living practically on the slopes of Mount Vesuvius, said, how do you live there, with all the earthquakes? One relative remembers when the volcano erupted in 1944; he was a boy, having a haircut, and the barber told him to go home to die, so he did go home, but he did not die, not then. Not like all the people of pompeii, whose frozen figures we visit now summertime hordes.

The volcano will erupt again, perhaps. The fires do not care for the patterns of human settlement; the earth shifts, the tide sweeps in and out. We make more mashed potatoes, because it is easier than trying to account for everything that could go wrong, every crack that could appear. We are surprised-but-not-surprised, again and again, by what we both know and do not know: that everything can happen, everything will happen, that is within our power to imagine.

***

We can, as I understand it, make fairly concrete predictions about how and even when the universe itself will cease to exist. I find this profoundly comforting, this idea that the universe is not forever, even if its eventual inevitable death is still so far off that we do not really have the vocabulary to describe how far off it really is. I guess it’s this idea that everything is bigger than you – that’s nice, isn’t it? I watch a simulation of what it would be like, if there was a place from where to watch the light from each star fade, like candles being extinguished. I mean, that’s perspective. The light from every star gone, or nearly gone. The whole of human history and potential completely irrelevant. All of us who ever have been and ever will be, all irrelevant together. It calms an anxious mind, to feel, every once in awhile, a little helpless. To feel at the mercy of the arrow of time rather than able to steer it.

***

I start to think about how the language of science is really just metaphor. Never mind the chemistry and the equations. We talk about the birth of the universe (itself an analogy – the birth of the universe, which we only say because we have really no other language for it, it is too far outside even our collective experience and understanding of things) in terms of ice crystals forming out of steam as it cools. We talk about entropy in terms of sand castles, nuclear fusion in terms of a child blowing bubbles.

So all these things that happen to us, all of these things that we can predict and equally not-predict, can be described in a language that is simple, relatable. It is their effects, I suppose, that we have a harder time understanding. The implications, the meanings. What it means that all the carbon in the universe, that lends life to us, was produced as a result of the death of something else. Maybe it doesn’t mean anything at all, but there is really no way to tell.

***

Maybe what I really want to say is that it feels unnatural to watch a natural disaster unfold. Like we have been given this great vantage point from which to do nothing. And I don’t know what good it does to watch, to feel helpless and sympathetic, to watch again; I only know that it is somehow better than not watching and not knowing.

❧

I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble’s A Summer Bird-Cage, which is ostensibly about a bunch of breathlessly, oppressively clever middle-class Oxford graduates adrift in the great sea of Reality. But the thing about it is that I haven’t read something that summarizes quite so nicely what it is to be in one’s 20s for a long time. And if it was meant to be a portrait of modern life for the female in 1963, it seems that rather shockingly little has changed.

In a way I’m sort of miffed about the book (which, by the way, I’m enjoying) because I feel like it’s a book I could write (or, more precisely, a theme I could write), except that we’re not allowed to write books like this anymore, even if they would be just as relevant today as they were in 1963.

***

Sarah, Drabble’s young protagonist, pondering the nebulous state of her engagement (or not-engagement) to the man she loves, who’s away at Harvard doing postgraduate study, considers that even “had I been never so happily engaged, all the problems of jobs and work and domesticity would have remained. The days are over, thank God, when a woman justifies her existence by marrying.” And Sarah’s friend Gill, recently separated from her husband, says to Sarah, when they meet for the first time in months, “You don’t know…what a difference it makes not to have meals provided. To know that if you don’t start peeling potatoes there won’t be any potatoes. You haven’t been out long enough to know.”

Gill might as well be anyone I know, experiencing for the first time the full weight of adulthood. And Sarah’s understanding that even if she had been settled down with a man she would not necessarily know any better what to do is precocious, hints at what I always think of as being a very contemporary sentiment: that one is never justified by love (and subsequently marriage, children, etc) – only (ideally) bolstered by it. That the great freedom and great burden of being a modern woman is to be able to be in a relationship and grow without growing out of the relationship itself.

The thing that bothers me about all this is that I’m not sure you ever really get good books about it nowadays. It’s as if the subject – which is really just “youth” – is passé somehow. Young people who write books don’t seem so inclined to write books about people our own age. Neither childhood nor old age seems as remote to us, as foreign, as our present situation does.

I mean to say that I don’t think it would necessarily occur to a 24-year-old writer, which is how old Drabble was when A Summer Bird-Cage was published (and how old, coincidentally, I am going to be next week), to write a very simple story about what it’s like to come from a position of relative privilege into The World. It certainly wouldn’t occur to anyone to publish it, I don’t think. Perhaps it’s not representative of enough of us anymore, not relatable to a great enough audience. Or perhaps youth today really is very much more complicated than youth in 1963 was. Anyway it seems to me that nowadays it’s all about quirkiness – people with unusual names and histories picking up and running away to the join the invisible circus and never being seen again (ha, ha) or MFA writing-workshop-worthy tales of growing up in rural Georgia with distant parents and overcoming a bad bout of Religious Fervor before escaping to the wilds of Williamsburg.

I suppose I have some respect for people who can write stories like that. I certainly never could, they’re too far out of the realm of my limited imagination, bear no relation (really) to anything I’ve ever felt.

***

And the thing I’m obsessed with feeling at the moment is to do with the introverted question of identity that, I suppose, a privileged few have the dubious privilege of considering. Consider this – a conversation between Sarah and a friend of her brother-in-law:

“‘So you’re going to be a don’s wife?’ [says the friend]
‘No. I’m going to marry a don.’ [says Sarah]
‘And what will you be?’
‘How should I know? I will be what I become, I suppose.’
‘You don’t find that a problem?’
How could I tell him that it was the one thing that kept me strung together in occasionally ecstatic, occasionally panic-stricken effort, day and night, year in, year out?”

A few months ago I came across this quote by Alain de Botton: “I explained that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.” I’ve heard de Botton speak, too, on a lack of good literature about work. And in a way I think A Summer Bird-Cage is like that, it’s like a portrait of something really mundane that lots of people (not all people! probably not even most people! but still, lots of people) do and feel every day, which is strike out on their own.

***

I know I’m being deliberately blind to make a point here. Probably people are actually writing about this all the time and I’m too self-absorbed to notice. But what I feel is that people my age are being pushed to feel younger and less qualified to expound upon our own experiences than we actually are. We’ve either lost the ability to take ourselves seriously because we feel too young, or else we’re too self-conscious about the awkwardness of this period to really want to write about it. We’ll write about bad sex and the discomfort of growing up, but something about the state of being newly grown-up is still too distasteful or confusing to address.

***

Sarah and her sister Louise put it this way:

“‘Oh, one can’t have everything,’ said Louise. ‘It’s either lovely food or lovely company.’
‘Of course one can have everything,’ I said. ‘Have one’s cake and eat it. I intend to.’
‘I daresay you do,’ she said. ‘So did I.’ She paused, and then said, in a different tone, a tone of intention rather than expectation, ‘and so do I. So do I.’
I didn’t see what she meant. Not for ages. Not until I learned myself how difficult it was to get anything, let alone the everything that is showered on one in garlands and blossoming armfuls until one faces the outside world.”

I don’t actually believe that one can’t have one’s cake and eat it, but I do know the way you assume you can before you have to start paying your own rent and peeling your own potatoes, and the way that the assumption changes after that.

So even though I know how difficult it is to get anything, I keep thinking that the answer to getting everything is just to keep going through life like this. And writing about it.

❧

I remember when it first occurred to me that after someone said, “how are you?” and I’d said, “fine,” I could ask, “how are you?” For the first time ever, I saw that the awful, inevitable silence which followed my “fine” was not inevitable at all.

It took me much longer to understand this than it should have, but it took me even longer to work up the courage to put what I’d discovered into practice. I remember the tremor in my voice the first time I said it – how are you? – as if this was the most important thing I had ever said in my young life, as if everything rested on this question, on the answer that followed.

I would say that I was shy, but shy is not precisely the right word. Shy implies an earnestness, a softness. And although I may have started out as simply shy, it turns out the reason that no one asked me to my senior prom (for example), or invited me to parties on the weekends, was because I scared people. In my fear that they would not like me (or, occasionally, my certainty that they did not), I had adopted a prickly attitude that at best could be interpreted as aggressively independent, at worst (and most often) aloof.

I’m better at not doing that, now. I’m capable of standing in a room full of people I’ve never met before and meeting them. That’s how I met the man I live with. I’m also capable of initiating and maintaing a conversation, developing friendships and relationships, making small talk, making big talk.

But the thing I want to say here is, the reason I’m like this now is because of the internet. At least in part. And that part matters.

***

People are criticizing the internet all the time and worrying that it is separating us from our own reality, turning us into inarticulate, slobbering creatures, Calibans on a digital island. And I, who have been shy, who have been lonely, resent and reject the idea – posited in a recent Guardian piece about Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together – that “technology is threatening to dominate our lives and make us less human. Under the illusion of allowing us to communicate better, it is actually isolating us from real human interactions in a cyber-reality that is a poor imitation of the real world.”

Because for me it is something that has made me more human.

I don’t mean to say that I don’t interact “in real life” (if we take that to mean “in the same room as other people”). I do interact in real life. In real life is where I walked into a pub without knowing anyone and walked out with the love of my life and the beginnings of a solid sense of community and belonging. In real life is where I meet friends for drinks and plot and plan and travel. Every morning I go into an office and interact with my colleagues in real life. And I don’t mean to say that the only reason I interact in real life is because of what happens online.

But let’s get one thing clear: online is real life, too. The things that happen online still happen, the voices you hear online are still voices. As Christian Payne (known online as Documentally) puts it in his excellent response to the Guardian piece: “social interaction online is still social interaction.”

***

So imagine that social interaction is a foreign land to you; that you hate the sound of your own voice, that you don’t know what to say, that every time someone asks you a question you can’t answer because you are too paralysed by the idea that you don’t know what to say. Imagine that you write scripts for yourself before you make telephone calls because if you don’t map it out you won’t be able to speak at all, and then the conversation deviates from the script anyway so you hang up in terror.

And then imagine that there is a space which is more sympathetic to your anxieties. Thoughts can be recorded, in writing, so that you can’t be later misunderstood through the fault of memory. Thoughts can be pre-meditated, considered. You can present yourself first – or a version of yourself, the strong version of yourself, not the version of yourself warped by too much worrying about too many unchangeable things – and then talk. So you are on even footing with everyone around you.

That is what I feel about the internet: that it is even footing.

***

If you are someone who does not need this boost, someone who feels naturally connected to others – or if you are someone for whom this does not matter, someone who prefers solitude – then I can see how it could appear off-putting. Online social interaction is often aggressively social. People follow you. Consider what this often means in colloquial terms: someone is following you. Someone is stalking you, preying on you. You do not want their attention, so it is not reciprocated. There is a perceived loss of privacy, a sense of diminished safety and security.

Online is a space that often does not feel safe and secure anyway, because it has no physical walls, no tangible presence. So to be followed online seems – intellectually – more threatening than to be followed down the street, because online is, theoretically, endless, pervasive, and intensely personal.

I get that. I also get that it seems, maybe, a little superficial. There is a physical distance, often, between two people interacting online, and maybe that physical distance can lead to a sort of emotional distance, too – is it harder to read signals, perhaps? Harder to identify what matters and what doesn’t? Harder to form a bond? It can be, for those who want it to be. And people for whom this is the case probably will not ever feel that online social interaction adds substantial value to their offline lives.

But still. “Huge swathes of socially impoverished disconnected people now have a voice and it is down to us to listen and connect,” Payne writes. And this is the thing, for me. Disconnected people are now connected. Isn’t that human? Isn’t that good? Including groups who have been – at some point or other – excluded?

***

The idea that social networking isolates us seems to rest on separating what we do online from what we do offline. But these activities are not necessarily separate. “That person you see at the bus stop staring at his phone or iPad may be me reading the Guardian or some other online publication. Would I be less isolated hidden behind a broadsheet newspaper?” Payne asks.

Online is just another space, another state of mind. Its beauty lies in its intangibility – and, simultaneously, its inhabitability. We even use a sort of modified architectural language to talk about it – we build and visit (web) sites, put up (pay) walls.

***

So the internet is a space for humans, not a replacement for them.

***

Other people are saying similar things. “The internet did not write this post. But it made it a lot easier for me to get it to you,” Dave Pell writes on Tweetage Wasteland, while over at the Independent, Rhodri Marsden writes: “Of course people behave badly online, but they behave badly offline, too. We can be fallible, annoying, even brutal; the difference today is that academics can observe it on the internet, and then state that society is definitely becoming “less human” in an attempt to shift some books.”

This debate – is the internet evil? is social media ruining the way we think? are we isolated and alone? – is getting tired. It’s evolving into something else, something more personal. It’s not just about a concept anymore. It’s not even just about a space; it’s about the people who inhabit that space, too.

Some of the people who inhabit that space, like me, find it an empowering place to be. And if “the way in which people frantically communicate online via Twitter, Facebook and instant messaging can be seen as a form of modern madness,” then so too can the way in which other people allow themselves to feel diminished by “inspiring and enhancing technologies”, refuse to see the humanity online, to empathize.

***

The thing is, the sky has been falling basically since the dawn of time, and Chicken Little’s voice is still not hoarse from all the lonely shouting, and yet we are still being human, in spaces with brick walls and spaces with walls we have to imagine.

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