::A Geek in Korea::

I originally started this blog, way back in 2001, as a way to keep in touch with friends and family when I moved to Korea. There was this fear lurking in the back of my brain that when I left the United States I was about to fall off the side of the Earth, and no one was going to know what I was doing, what I liked, or how to contact me. Things have now gone in the complete opposite direction, and I’ve added a Twitter badge on the side of the page to let people know what I am doing at any moment I have some spare time in front of the computer. That’s irony.

I read this extremely interesting article about “ambient awareness“. The basic idea is that while one tweet or another might not be very much, but taken in aggregate over the course of days, weeks, or months, and you’ll build up a weak bond with a person that would have otherwise been nonexistent. That weak casual bond, as if you had known what someone was up to, as if you were watching them in the peripheral vision at a party.

I think I developed this fear of disconnection back in elementary school. Back then, I lived in rural Ohio, cut off from suburbia. At the time, I thought it was a bit of a curse. All the people at school would go home, visit their friends house down the street, and play together. If I went down the street I was likely going to get run over by a semi-truck. My only neighbors were corn and watermelons. When I would return to school after summer vacation, all those friendships people had advanced through the days they spent together, while I was sitting outside their bubble trapped by fields of corn in boredom.

It’s no wonder I was someone that go interested in computers, and the Internet, right away to make friends and keep up with people I knew. I would chat on my parents computer with it’s 2400 baud modem just to meet new people. When I had to go to college, I made lots of great friends, but returning home during summer meant being basically cut off again.

If going back home in the United States means I was cut off from my friends, just imagine what it was like when I decided to move to South Korea, across the planet. I started the blog to keep in touch with my friends and family. It is also a therapeutic way for me to get out my stress about living here. Now it’s grown into something else, a sort of professional diary where I archive my teaching thoughts, place where I talk about my hobbies, and a personal window into my vacations and travels.

Still, it’s all about that connection I’m trying to maintain across great distances. Hell, my friends who read my site took a week of their time to visit me and tour Korea. In my mind, it’s proof that all that effort, those thousands of hours spent blogging, have paid off.

Twitter is an even more hyper-version of a blog. It’s faster. It’s more personal. I might tweet a thought between classes, or (If Twitter ever gets a Korean SMS number) explain something anywhere I go. I’m interested in it as an experiment in connectivity. It’s a shame that none of my friends in the States, or Korea, really use it. I’m currently following some fellow Korean bloggers, some Internet celebrities, and whatnot, but I’m the early adopter when it comes to these things in my circle.

Anyway, what are you doing?