One of the nice things about using Twitter is that you get to “meet” interesting people from all over the solar system (yes, yes, all from one planet, for the time being). I was amused, however, to get a message from a person that expressed delight at meeting on Twitter someone from Israel. The Internet is global and universal, after all, a prime expression of the supposedly flat world we live in, and we’re used by now to connect and interact with people from all countries without second thought; and this person told me she has Twitter friends from a list of countries – she was actually happy to “collect” acquaintances from distant lands!
This reminded me of the good ol’ days when I was a ham radio operator. One of the main things we radio amateurs did (when we weren’t building radio gear, anyway) was trying to collect confirmed contacts with as many different countries, regions, continents as we could… the farther the better. There were awards to be won for this, like the DX Century Club, or DXCC, given to anyone who had proof of talking to 100 different countries. And there was great satisfaction in discerning through one’s headphones the faint signal from some distant island or principality, calling the sender and getting a reply to add to one’s growing list. We also relished the conversation, the shared interests, the new friends; but the extra dimension of geographic distribution added to the excitement.
At least one person out there – on my network, too – still feels that excitement!
Nathan,
Apropos flat world. I was recently interested in building a sling. A true sling, such as David’s sling, not a slingshot.
One of the designs I found was put up by a fellow from Greenland, who learned it from a local native … I got a kick out of that.