Stitching the Internet to Joe Daily

"For Stacey Kim, a 36-year-old book editor who lives in the Boston suburb of Arlington, Massachusetts, emotional blogging has become a reflex. On April 11, 2007, Kim curled up next to her husband and held him as he succumbed to a long battle with pancreatic cancer. The next morning, she went online to post about the experience.

"It cemented the reality that he was gone," Kim says. "I got hundreds of comments back that were all so loving and supportive. It gave me a really tangible sense of community."

This is from an article on CNN.com which is about the role blogging has in dealing with trauma. What I find especially interesting here though is the way Kim phrased this, "It cemented the reality that he was gone". So often we like to pretend that the internet and real life are two seperate things, and this causes a lot of stress, because feelings about events that happen on the internet can be as real as those that happen off of it. But that doesn't change for many people the notion that there is a logged on identity and a logged off identity. What we are seeing with this kind of statement is that they are actually tandem, or even *gasp* one in the same thing.

Why this is useful is because many people underrate the experience building power of the internet, and don't really understand that the ways it works are akin to the way say astral traveling would work for a magician. What we are talking about here, with the internet. Is a kind of communal self-conscious experience. The internet you experience is in large part due to various clicks, gestures, and feints that you make on it to produce various kinds of experiences, both intellectually and emotionally. Whether it's reading an interesting article, watching a funny youtube video, or talking to a lover--these experiences are guided by a kind of sub-conscious drive that externalizes in a very obvious way the identities and desires of the various factions of the human unconscious. Now, this happens too in your life away from the internet. The way that you build experiences, is in large part due to your will, not random uncontrollable forces, but subtle and overt pushes and pulls of your will. The internet is just a more graphic and obvious expression of this--and a much quicker one.

And the thing is, if you pay attention to what is happening on the internet, the things that you are doing, the worlds that you are shaping, you are going to be that much closer to learning how to shape them through these experiences. It is possible with the internet to induce experiences in a much quicker and efficient way than you would offline. And in doing so, you can shape and change your identity and surroundings at a much more rapid rate. Both on and offline. It should be very obvious, that the internet is the new astral plane for magicians. All of your tools are here to make will manifest and reach a higher knowledge of self.

The key is to, like Kim, pull those experiences in and out of the offline experience, until the both of them are stitched together in one coherent identity, whether that's a patchwork job or not.