From: Menno Rubingh (rubingh@delftnet.nl)
Date: Sun Dec 26 1999 - 23:08:13 MST
On Sun, 26 Dec 1999, eugene.leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de crossposted the
following message, from the transhumantech@onelist.com mailing list,
originating from mnielsen@theory.caltech.edu :
> The internet is a terrific way to connect people with common interests,
> but it's a little lacking in that the contact usually remains online,
I think this problem formulation views things from an inverted point of view:
it confuses cause and effect. Through internet (i.e., through mailing lists
and such), you come into contact with a larger number of
people-with-similar-interests than you could have come into contact with
without internet, so this can only *increase* your probability of finding
people satisfying both of the criteria of (a) having interests common to your
own and (b) also living near you.
If you, while you live, say, in France, come into contact with a terribly
interesting person in Canada, then this only adds to the circle of interesting
people known to you. How could this *subtract* in any way from the
probability of your making contact some time in the future with an interesting
person who *does* live near you in France ? This Canadian in his turn will
also know other people, some of who(?m) might also live in France. Your
having made contact with this Canadian only *increases* your chances of
finding interesting people locally. The only difference is that your personal
''network'' of contacts -- when enhanced by internet -- becomes more
widespread and more international (at the same as it grows bigger), where
pre-internet it was maybe more confined to internal to the country or even
confined to internal to the town. The fact that some of the ''threads'' of
connections through which you find local interesting people are now more
scattered around the globe than pre-internet, in itself is *not* a cause that
you come into contact with a *smaller* proportion of the interesting part of
the people living near you.
Sure, the number of people you come into contact with living too far away to
visit in a single-day trip maybe *does* increase (that is, until we invent,
e.g., a long-distance sort of Star Trek ''beam me up, Scotty''-style of travel
:-)), but so does the number of interesting and worthwhile people you come
into contact with who do live near you.
Best regards, Menno (rubingh@delftnet.nl)
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