The internet is a frightening place.
You have your world, right? Your normal, every day world. You have work, study, friends you see a lot, friends you see once in a blue moon, people you try to avoid. You have books and movies and sport and music. You have hobbies--you might even have dreams you work on fulfilling in the background.
Then you have the internet, a vast, time-sucking black hole of mostly useless information, peopled with freaks and kindred spirits (and with sites like Facebook, people you know! So, both...), and it's just constant streams of information and non-information and stimuli and noise noise noise.
Back in the early noughties, when you first hit the internet, you build a little nest for yourself in the first tree you come across. You craft it with care, line it with the finest in scraps, and snuggle down, happy. You have your own little presence. You've built a little place for yourself. Sooner or later, you venture out, pecking your way forward little bit by little bit, going a little further each time, until--lo and behold! What is this? It's another bird! You went for the same worm! (Don't ask what a worm is doing in a tree; this is an analogy. We're looking at the bigger picture here.) What a lot you have in common!
And this bird likes other things you do? Even better! What good fortune!
This bird introduces you to another bird or three, and you all have a few things in common! You happily chat away for days, logging on at odd hours of the morning because they're all in different time zones, having keyboard smashes of lols at the funny things you all say, and generally having a whale of a time. There should be a birdy metaphor here, not a fishy reference, but I can't think of one.
And then one day one of these birds invites you back to its nest, and in its nest, you see a stick.
Baby, you've never seen anything like this stick before in your life. It looks really cool. It does cool stuff. It's a real talking point. It's spouting things you've never heard before, and you want more of it. Where can you get one?
The bird it belongs to agrees to link you to a new place. It's a new branch. It might even be a new tree. Whatever the case, there are tonnes of these sticks here, and even more birds flying around talking and interacting and doing birdy things together, and you realise--your sleepy little tree was nothing compared to this. This is where it's at. Stuff is going on here. Your birdy friend shows you its own nest in this place. It tells you it's not known as 'bird' here. Here, it's known as 'Shadowslayer'. It's nest isn't like the fluffy nest you knew, all colourful and decorated with the knitting patterns you both loved and bonded over. This nest is a different kettle of fish. There we go with the fish references again. This nest is decorated in the industrial style, with shards of metal and pieces of concrete. That might even be a little mouse skull in the corner. You wonder how it died, and take a closer look at your friend. 'Shadowslayer' is looking a little different round the edges. Does it have a mohawk? And a pierced wing?
Yeah, my little friend, Shadowslayer says. "This is another side of me." And that's when you realise: you don't have to just be one bird. You don't just have to have one nest. You can have two!
Baby, you've just stuck your teensy claw into this world. You ain't seen nothing yet.
On your own, you venture around the branches of the two trees that you're familiar with. You find out that there's a lot going on. You realise you need a couple of different nests and outfit changes so that you project what you want to project here. Knitting patterns just aren't appropriate in the goth metal nest you've also built. Your writerly postings don't quite match the beer-swilling sports branches. So you build a few more nests to match the different parts of you. (You shy away from the wing piercing, though. That's a little extreme.) All the while, you're making more birdy friends, inviting them over to your nest, and inviting a select few back to your other nests.
Pretty soon, you're intertwined irrevocably. What you've been doing here is making little nests for yourself on different branches of different trees in the internet forest, and gradually you get to know your neighbours or share a nest with a few other birds, and then you start to connect your different nests together, until eventually you're living in a chattering hive of birds and nests and newfangled sticks that do things you can't quite figure out and freeze mid-pulse for no reason at all sometimes, and there are those random bird feeders filled with honey and seeds and all these other birds shouting at you to try and buy their birdy wares and you're spending too much time there and it just gets too much.
So you retreat. You start taking down your nests, selling the parts for scrap, letting the birds you really liked know that they can find you at the first nest, and nowhere else. A few nests you just abandon altogether.
You might even fly away from the internet forest entirely and not come back for a while--migrate to South America, or the like, and enjoy not having any 'responsibility' to keep logging on.
But your old friends haunt you. The nests you made--the extra rooms you added on to them and the beauty of them--they haunt you. The gossip you're missing haunts you. In short, bird calls are taking over your dreams and you have no choice. You have to go back.
So you put it off for as long as possible, and then gradually come back. You start to refurbish your nests, one or two at first, and then the rest of them come back. You start setting up a couple of new ones here and there--until all the noise gets to you and you close up shop and migrate back to real life for some peace and quiet. It's safe there.
But the bird calls still echo in your mind, and so you fly off, back to the nests and the birdy friends you miss so much, and soon you're caught in an endless yoyo-y cycle of migration, and one day you wake up and realise that this whole extended metaphor passed the realm of the ridiculous a long time ago.
In summary, this is why I have a backlog of emails from friends I haven't connected with in months, why I shrink away from the forums I once frequented, and why I haven't posted on this blog since January.
In theory, I should love the internet. It's introduced me to some great people, some amazing ideas, and some helpful hints. It's just that instead of loving it, I get scared of it because it's so big and it seems impossible to do only one thing on there at once.
Trees weren't meant to be this complicated.
So my question is: How does everybody else cope with this? Am I alone in being so freaked out?
And does anybody know exactly why a cute little bird would find a pierced wing asethetically pleasing?
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