I just spoke with someone who was helped by the very thing I questioned yesterday and all but derided--online confessions of personal problems. I don't need to describe exactly how she was helped; suffice it to say that I was at least partially wrong to suggest, yesterday, that there's no merit in such forms of communication.
We all need to connect. If it has to happen through the Internet in certain instances, I'm all for it. What I suppose I don't like is the degree to which we're failing to connect in other ways--through face-to-face contact, for instance. I also don't like the degree to which many people assume that revealing intimate details about themselves and their families in a public forum is a perfectly normal way to function.
Anyway, that seems to me to be the trend: more public striptease, less private intimacy. And E.M. Forster's line, "Only connect," has never rung truer to me than in our Internet-mad society.
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