By the Light of the Screen - April 3 2024

 

By the Light of the Screen

April 3 2024

I’m everywhere and nowhere

all at once.

Sure, somewhere in cyberspace

they’ve catalogued my location;

but in the black box of the internet

this happens seamlessly, invisibly

without lifting my eyes from the screen.

And the marketplace

that never closes

is not a bricks and mortar store

but virtual,

who-knows-where in the world.

So I’m untethered

ungrounded

a little lost.

I surf, scan, scroll,

rarely pausing to look up.

And never noticed

that night fell,

the snow stopped,

the dogs have gotten restless.

You can see me in the dark

by the light of the screen,

red-rimmed eyes

that infrequently blink,

pale skin

that even for winter

seems grimly bloodless.

They promised a techno-utopia

of endless choice

and universal brotherhood.

But forgot

that utopia is Latin for “no place”,

which, in dimensionless cyberspace

this surely is.

If hardly utopian.

Where I’m a citizen of the world,

but also stateless.

Where I roam the planet,

but am also confined to my head.

At least they’ve promised privacy

and that’s exactly how it feels;

truly anonymous

in this nowhere black box,

a digital cipher

scrolling compulsively

but never stopping to read.

As Jonathan Haidt characterizes the internet (and social media in particular): disembodied, asynchronous , shallow, and solitary.

This feeling I could be anywhere, and that I’m everywhere all at once, leaves me feeling lost, with nothing solid to grab hold of, rather than securely grounded and contained.

Just as we need identity, belonging, and acceptance, we also need a sense of place. Without it, we not only feel unattached, but spiritually unmoored; not only unsettled, but homeless.