Lost without Space

A day with very spotty and sometimes non-existent cyberconnections has left me really thinking about how it has become part of my life, and the lives of people I love. Every week, at least, my mails cross the Atlantic, fly south across Africa, and land in Cape Town , in a lightly wooded suburb on the eastern slopes of Table Mountain. They are read in a small room which serves as a study, and my words pop up on a screen read by my mother. And her words wing their way north, and west, as they have for so many years. I know an energy must be created by all this connecting. So much is positive, so much of it must be destructive. The humming, minute to our ears, must add to the vibration of our planet and send into space the message that we are a talking place... the ones who must pass things back and forth. Who must share. Because our whole globe, from a distance, is glowing with the evidence of it.

To know, now, that I can touch a key on my laptop in New York and become instantly connected with a human who until that moment is a perfect and invisible stranger, to know that that strangeness can be dispelled by an epic, consecutive exchange of, well, everything, because of a happenstance series of cybertravels, is to know that the Internet is a marvellous thing.

You really can Google the person you want.