The (Social) Net

The internet is a virtual digi-cosm of human behavior and relationships. It is a web-verse, a world parallel to our own, mimicking the habits and perversions of what users call RL, as if the emotional experiences we have staring at a monitor impact us any less than being in a physical setting, such as the highschool lunchroom, where the cool kids sit at one table while the geeks sit at another.

I remember a time when the only means of connecting by internet was by email. It was astounding, back then, to be able to send correspondence in a matter of seconds, when the only thing standing between a letter and its recipient was the time it took for a user to find a computer, log on, and click. Then email became a place where groups can meet and exchange ideas. Mailing lists and "Yahoogroups" seemed so amazingly simple. To be able to create a virtual club with a simple click of the mouse and an easy-to-answer registration form, it seemed almost anti-social not to create a community or join one.

But of course, an evolution was at hand, and mailing lists became newsletters, and newsletters became message boards, and message boards became forums. Suddenly, everyone can put up a website, or a "homepage," where real estate meant web space, and web space was like renting an apartment where you can use the space as you see fit within certain limitations, though the limitations were few. Site owners were able to exist within pages of their own script, creating their own worlds where their isolation was the groundwork of their social dream.

It wasn't until the creation of the Live Journal that people began to realize how much more fun it was to reach out beyond the confines of a private space to have a public platform which they can still call their own. At its conception, Live Journal seemed so exclusive and private, but once it opened to the public and everyone can register, it became a haven for sharing and--as the term was coined by Emily Gould in the New York Times, "oversharing." There were no limits to what could be posted on "LJ." From the harrowing truth to the ugliest lies, from individual creativity to community endeavors like Role Playing Games. LJ allowed virtual freedom of thought and experience.

As LJ gained popularity, the internet began to realize the potential of group and community interaction. Friendster was the first among the social networks. It was a pointless endeavor of popularity. To have more than a hundred friends on your friends folder seemed like the main goal, whereas when you reached out to your old highschool and college friends, you can proudly display your plentiful friends. It was only after MySpace, Facebook, Multiply, and Linked In came into the picture that the friends list began to gain real importance. Suddenly everyone is caught and obligated to sign up for accounts, because if you aren't, you're simply out of the loop and unprofessional. Social networking forced us all to list, categorize, and classify our lives; and it made some of us see how sadly inadequate we are in acquiring a social circle. Kind of like highschool.

Wordpress, Blogger, and LJ are the havens of written digital thought. Bloggers have found uses for the internet that used to be the realm exclusively accessed by journalists, published authors, and columnists alone. The internet has changed the scape of publishing. Writers and aspiring writers can post their work in a public venue that gives room for failure, growth, and even eventually profit.

Writers have to have blogs; they should have a web presence in MySpace, Facebook, and RedRoom; they should be in Shelfari and Twitter. It's amazing how much writing an author should do after she's finished writing her book.

I just finished reading When You Are Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris. His book, full of delightful tales of everyday embarrassments, read like the many journal entries I've read and written on Live Journal. I'm not saying anybody can write like David Sedaris can. In fact, only a hand full could be so entertaining, so truthful, and so talented as he is, but if he hadn't had the opportunity to be published, he could have been blogging at Blogger.com. He would've been hugely popular, and eventually, he would've gotten published anyway.

An Auspicious Time

I'm not a particularly unlucky person, and even supposing I were, I would never subscribe my bad luck to the usual superstitious juju, because I'm not afraid of walking under ladders unless there's an idiot with a bucket of paint at the top of it, I've kept black cats as pets, I think keeping a stuffed rabbit's foot is grotesque, and I think someone throwing salt over one's shoulder is a waste of good seasoning. So I think this June's Friday the 13th is the perfect time to start a MySpace blog. Call it defying superstition.

That said, I believe in the weirdest things. I believe in Ghosts, Aliens, and an All-Knowing Being, all three I've never physically seen--and I seldom believe anyone who says they have, but there's a potent feeling in my gut that tell me they exist.

What this all boils down to is that while I consider myself reasonably pragmatic in most things, I love escapism in books. I love to read stories, fiction or even non-fiction. And herein lies the essence of my blog: Books.

Many of us love it. Some of us have the pleasure of working for and with it. I work as a Web Publicist for a major publishing company and I have access to books pre-publication. That isn't to say that this blog is only going to be about pre-pub books. This blog will center around books: What I've read, what everyone else is reading, what's been turned into a movie, who wrote it, what I'm using as a door stop, what I used to hit my husband over the head with, what I'm reading to my son even if he's only five months old and doesn't understand a damn thing if has nothing to do with milk, his diaper, and his playtime, and the books I've been assigned for the month/season/divine punishment. For my innaugural book, I bring you the clever and saucy Live Alone and Like It by Marjorie Hilis.

Let me tell you a thing or two about this book. It's pink, it's short, and it was first published in 1937. When I first began to market this book to online bloggers, mostly of the chick lit persuasion, every single one of them considered it a "hoot" to read and review this book. Everyone thought that it was fascinating that a chick from the 1930s, when the 1950s woman was the future, would write a book about a woman living alone and--heaven forbid--liking it.

It's always with chagrin when I explain to them that you'd be surprised about how relevant a lot of the advice in the book is to today's "live aloner." And of course, again, they'd think what I said was a "hoot." I'm apparently very fluent in Owlese.

I couldn't blame anyone for doubting Ms. Hillis' credibility on the matter of living alone as a woman. She's not even alive anymore. That's not going to help the book's publicity, either, but the woman lived in a time when smoking women were fashionable (as in, having a cigarette was an accessory!). This counts for something, and she titled one of her chapters "The Pleasures of a Single Bed," in which she begins the chapter with,

"It is probably true that most people have more fun in bed than anywhere else,
and we are not being vulgar. Even going to bed alone can be alluring. There are
many times, in fact, when it's by far the most alluring way to go."

That's not a hoot. That's pure genius!