Whatever

Whatever happened, I wondered, to Connie Sun? After I'd heard about her comics blog from NPR, I followed it for a while, then would drop in now and again, and eventually some time had gone by since I'd last read it. I dropped in, and found that the most recent post was more than a year old.

It is, in a way, the curse of the Internet. It's remarkable easy to feed more interests than one can reasonably keep up with, and so it's inevitable that some, if not many of them are going to fall by the wayside, until something reminds one of them. By which point, the thing in question may no longer exist.

I understand, intellectually, that the internet is ephemeral. In the end, it's all just links to digital media, and digital media is ephemeral in a way that other things are not. I have a few books in my home that are older than I am. And while those books may be out of print, the books themselves are still there. They are physical objects, and that lends them a durability (nothing in genuinely permanent) that seems to be lacking from computer files.

The tenuous connections and pseudo-connections facilitated by the Internet are just as ephemeral, but at least to me, they also tend to lend the people themselves that same quality. I'm petty sure that Ms. (or maybe she's become Mrs. in the meantime) Sun is still doing her thing, and still being a perceptive observer of the world, her place in it, and how she and it interact as she moves through it. But I don't actually know Ms. Sun; I simply followed her cartoons from literally the other side of the continent. At that remove, I can't even prove that she's a real person; it could have been a pseudonym, for all that I know. And in that sense, the lack of updates to her blog are no different than if she'd been deleted by someone who decided that they no longer needed to maintain that identity.

I've "met" a lot of people on the Internet who have effectively ceased to exist in the same  way. I suspect that they're still out there, but with the digital connection between us broken, it's like they were never really there at all. Kind of like losing a telephone number or an address back in the day,

And so I wonder. Are there people out there for whom I am simply another ghost in the network of machines? A person who wandered in out of the digital ether, touched their lives briefly and then disappeared again?