I'm at a coffee shop right now. I was at another one a month or so ago when my friend across table looked up from her computer, and I looked up from mine, and she said "we're really just hanging out in a house with a bunch of strangers." Which was right. "And not talking to them," I added, which was also true and strange.
It made me think about Elliot's post defending social media sites (or at least rationalizing them) as responding to a broad cultural dearth of public space. Only, in the coffee shops we don't usually talk to people -- or we do, on our computers, talk to very distant people, rather than the people in the room there with us. Strange indeed.
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I had to go to this hostel, in Downhill, Northern Ireland, to hear about this terrific band from Austin, where I lived for two years. Admittedly, I'm so paranoid about my ears that I'm often scared to even use headphones, let alone go to rock shows. And admittedly, Austin is home to an absolutely batty number of bands. But still. Rather than hearing about Shearwater and physically attending a show, rather than ever seeing this Jonathan Meiburg character in person (despite the fact that we were probably at the Spider House at the same time at some point since August 2007), he went to Downhill Hostel and became friends with the owners, and then I went to Downhill Hostel and got to hear his LP (on vinyl, which was cool) over a dram of Coleraine Irish whiskey.
It's probably not a 2010 thing; I suppose the world has always abounded in bizarre and unexpected connections, hence the seven-degrees game and the novels of Dickens. But still.
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