Head in the Clouds

This week's assignment required us to take a look at our place in the internet cloud. After some thinking and sketching, and a bunch of procrastinating, I finally came up with a decent sketch of where the cloud and I sit.

As you can see, I picture myself as being integrated into the cloud. I feel that I'm pretty much wired in. My classes, work, play, and friends are all accessed through this medium. Most of my hobbies involve something to do with the web. 95% of my day revolves around working on, playing on, or otherwise interacting with the cloud in some way, shape or form. I don't much mind this, but it helps to put things in perspective. I do spend a lot of time around here, bumming from page to page, like window shopping at the mall. While this is a valid passtime, it certainly shouldn't be undertaken 24-7. But this is where I live. The graphics and web pages I create are made for this place, like art you'd hang on your wall. My screen is my front door - my closest friends live thousands of miles away, so we interact through online games and voice chatting rather than in-person activities or phone calls. From this little portal, my world can expand to the ends of the (e-)universe with just the click of a few buttons.

But being a cloud, or even just part of it is empty. By nature, you're hardly there, naught but a bit of vapor flowing through the sky, only to vanish when the hard light of day hits you. It's much the same for me. I spend so much time here, that interpersonal communication becomes hard. Granted, I've never really been good at verbally expressing myself, often finding it easier to write what I'm thinking when I have the ability to go back and change a word or think through my thoughts more thoroughly, but now it's near impossible. I can talk to people, but I find it uncomfortable and lacking. I like the lag time from comment to comment you can find on the internet in chatrooms or forums. You can decide who you're going to respond to, what you're going to say and how you're going to say it before it ever comes out. It provides you with that extra second of pause before you post that zinger that really seemed important when ThatGuy814 said that the sky was green, allowing you to see that the response you've just drafted is no better than his, and there's no reason to feed the trolls, as it were.

Well, being part of a cloud isn't always so bad, I suppose. There are always thousands of other droplets bumping around for you to chat with, quick, fleeting interactions providing that little bit of human connection via the front door on your desk...