Two weeks ago I was laying on my belly in a little guest-room in Hawaii, turning right to look out at the broad pacific ocean. I'm addicted to distraction. The sound of notification chimes from my phone. I ignore it, but am tempted. I'm constantly drawn back into Facebook, as though pulled, from a physical aloneness, into the digital public square. There must be peers there, yes, but is it an illusion of togetherness? We seem to move ever so imperceptibly toward this falsity of companionship. Where are these people? The implicit suggestion of the photographs and posts is that we are busy living, thriving, in a real world. Yet, here we are, day after day, in the same digital sphere, called back, like salmon returning to our birthplace, to spawn. If it's so real, so deep, so satisfying, so present, why are we sitting with our faces attached to a screen, updating this moment into a public journal; as if to say to each other "Hello!?" "Greetings!" Here I am. Living. Here I am, I exist. The public square, the village, evaporated into ethereal digitation.
