Engaging in Cyberspace

When email first became available to me about 25 years ago, the possibilities spurred my imagination of finding old friends and keeping in touch more easily.  I still utilize it but the novelty has long since evaporated.  For the most part much of it tries to sell me something and goes unread.  Facebook now sends me Memory posts of 10 years ago.  It's been that long.  I reconnected with a fair number of people.  Friends never became close friends.  The regular posters worth engaging might number a dozen, not a lot different than email.  Twitter allows brief interaction with intellectual superstars and people with spheres of influence.  But most of it is toxic and not really interactive.

Coronavirus has introduced us to Zoom, the virtual meeting.  I've been to online meetings at work in the past.  They never had the spontaneity of an on-site meeting.  Zoom sessions haven't captured that either.  What they have done is provide access to any number of topics discussed by experts who can then field mostly anonymous questions selected by a moderator who already knows what the question is.  It enables me to attend sessions that would not otherwise be offered to me, which is an important start.  Conversation it isn't, but those chat rooms of the 1990's or Medscape or Sermo's rapid posting of comments had their limitations as well.  For all the technological advancement, there's still nothing like actually being there.