Is it possible ever to die in cyberspace?
I was recently urged by Facebook to do something obtuse because my friend Josephine (pseudonymed for very good reason here) is doing it and knows I will love it. Hmm. There’s just one small problem here: Josephine has been dead for well over a year. You’d think Facebook might have noticed.
Yet, there she is, smiling her gentle smile, alive and welcoming to the Facebook friends who surely wish it were so. What to do? Ask her daughters to wipe their mom off the pages of the Facebook planet? Bookmark the page for the cheer it brings? Or try to ignore it lest it become spooky like those answering machine voices out of the past? I’m still pondering.
On the other hand, I more or less died to the cyberworld myself about six weeks ago. This was not an intentional — or even dignified — death. As a matter of fact, I had contracted not that long ago with my very alive, cyber-efficient friend Ryan to help me close this Blogspot page, fancy up my Wordpress page, figure out widgety details and generally add interest and gravitas to my presence in cyberspace. For a while, progress was made toward all that. But life, and a manuscript, intervened.
Having promised the manuscript of my one-day book Perilous Times: An inside look at abortion before — and after Roe v Wade to the nice folks at YBK Publshing by September 1, I suddenly, seriously needed to finish the thing. And the only way I could figure out how to accomplish such a feat — we’re talking 1,500 words a day with a few last-minute interviews tossed in — was just to drop out of cyberspace and into computerland until it was done. So this long-dormant Blogspot blog, some day destined to die, and the fits & starts of its sister WordPress incarnation of Boomers & Beyond have been hanging out, forlorn and ignored, lo these many weeks.
This sorry state of affairs is at least not quite as bad as the state of my late lamented paid gig with True/Slant.com. My True/Slant page has been hanging, frozen, in space ever since Forbes bought the site & I declined to write for Forbes (full disclosure: they weren’t begging me anyway) more than two years ago. You can't DO anything or go anywhere else on True/Slant; that page is dying an undignified death indeed. And anyone stumbling onto it will think, “Poor dear, she hasn’t had a new thought in 782 days”…. since the only thing moving on the page is the tabulator that says how many days it’s been since this post. Those old T/S posts are archived on WordPress, so it seems logical to keep that page alive.
So there you are. Some Facebook posts hinted at meeting publisher deadlines and a little more info here....congratulations. Will look forward to your new book.
ReplyDeleteTo your post, I think it's kind of nice we leave behind a blog. Initials in a sidewalk. Kilroy was here. Eventually it will fade away. Glad you're back on the Internet. I'll check out Boomers.