the hyperlink

I am working on a job application right now, where after a preliminary round, I’m being asked to write a course syllabus up for a class to be called “The Human Event.” I've been informed that the goal of this class is to have students, “think critically and seriously about the nature of human existence.” An admirable goal for a 3 credit-hours.

And the human event is an event in the making-- made, unmade, making out. Anthropologists, I wonder if it would be fair to that for a good half or more the 20th century the human event has been analysed through the lens of small group living ,and its naturalness. Of then the group and its social links as a structural reality that mediates human culture and identity.


Given this, given jet planes, telephones and the internet, what is a natural social reality now? I mean right now? If the hunters-and-gatherers of yester-year seemed to exist generally in groups of 50-300 people, in-the-flesh, everyday, I-know-your-2nd-cousin kind of groups, then it seems a lot has changed at least for the American Modern; it is a social life and identity now aerosolized into a peculiar kind of mist. Full of new possibilities, of coincidence, of something very different. of some completely other kind of recognition. But maybe I speak only of my own take on it.

Maybe I speak to this web-log, this paper boat, a folded sheet of wood-pulp floating on an ether sea of electron waves. I started putting entries here mainly for the distraction of some friends whose numbers are of the single digit sort (hi Rob, Jeff, Jen). But strangers come across the boat too, occasionally adding a friendly comment or nudge, often simply as "anonymous."

(paper boats at P.S.1 in NYC)

I came across Audra’s web-log, “Budapest and the Rest," through her comments to this log, and I imagine she through to me by the fact we use the same blog service, in a comaraderie of technology. I check into her web-log to get a refreshing dose of the Magyar life of someone I don't even know. Of something far away and completely unrelated to me. Sometimes it almost feels like reading someone else's mail, or a letter simply addressed to "you all." And so maybe that is what my web-log is as well, I wonder -- a letter with vague address?
…

I was reading a recent post about some contemporary art in Budapest involving, of all contemporary things, tampons. In writing about the problem some men have in engaging over this facet of life, Audra mentioned a certain “Vinnie” as an enlightened male.

Vinnie?
Well, his name was conveniently hyperlinked, so:
(click, click)

And it is a Vinnie of apparent “tampon case” fame (!)

But wait, something is strange, and it is not the retro tampon case. No.
Who is that woman holding the case with such verve in the left hand corner?..... I know her!

(In fact, I know her)
Or rather, I know who she is.
…

Even though I’m sitting down in the coffeshop, I think I need to sit down again, because I am reading about tampons in Budapest on the internet only to click on a link that pops R.’s face on my screen. I swear it is R., if for no other reason, the left-coiled coif that is verging on “beehive” that is pretty unmistakable. And I was riding in R.’s car to the primate center the other day. to look at lemurs. for a women’s studies class that I am sitting in on. that my friend Jenny is teaching. and what-the-hell?

So I know the woman in the photo. or actually just kind of know her. we discuss feminist science theory >but I really don't know her at all >but she is now here on my laptop screen, which is…which is this other context of Knowing where I can know a fair bit about people that I don't know hardly at all.

Writing it out now, I'm sure it reads as pretty unremarkable. But at that hyperlinked and most unprepared moment, you must understand that this confluence of place, space, time, people, context, and hypertext some how hit my mind like some zen koan, all bright purple and impossible.

I mean, these paths that make no sense lead you back to you in ways unpredictable, the real distance of continents a virtual distance, transformed into a utterly unexpected and local association. It’s like saying goodbye to someone boarding a plane only to find them working the toll booth on the way out of the airport parking garage.


It is almost too much? maybe too little. it is this new possibility of casually knowing more and more about people and events that we, as a trend, know actually less and less about. And it isn't just the internet. The comments we overhear, the conversations we remember, the references, associations, they all leave us shadow-knowing so many people and things we don't, won't, or have no want, to know.

This feeling is true for me, so I imagine equally for you. You the anonymous reader, that is.

What is this. If anything, it seems to be the human event. at least the 1st world human condition, a rumoured society of global acquaintances that I think the my ancestors nestled in the Yangtze river plain or Carpathians knew nothing of, though for better, worse, either, or, I can't really figure. Needless to say though, I’m trying to work Audra’s blog into the syllabus now. and of course, Vinnie too, who R. tells me is doing very well with his business...