Wednesday, October 5, 2011

No Coinky-Dink, I Think

Many of my friends live in my neighborhood or spend a good amount of time there for one reason or another. I believe that I've said this in the past, or I think I might have. I have been thinking about how it still was a coincidence that I would bump into them, or that I would ever in the past have seen people I wasn't expecting to anywhere. Without having communicated my plans to them, how could an encounter be by anything but chance?

That makes it seem special when that's the case, but I don't know if that can truly be the case, or rather I should say that I could never know for sure that it is the case. The culprit is of course technology, or is it me? Technology is really only the tool. It's these social networking websites that are all now imploring us to tell the world where we are. For a number of reasons, we probably shouldn't. Thieves will know we're out, and advertisers get more help in targeting us, just to name a couple reasons.

The big one is that chance is eliminated from unplanned encounters when your friends know where you are and go find you. I like it when there are coincidences and accidents. It's exciting, scary and startling though it might be when they happen. I like it when I bump into friends, but I get disappointed when I find out that they knew they'd find me where I am because they saw I 'checked into' the place. That has happened lately.

It remains uncommon, and maybe it never will be very much so (although the way that things are trending I doubt that). Maybe there's really nothing there, but it feels to me like there is. I know that I don't like it. It may be so that if I start being more secretive about my whereabouts online that it will probably diminish somewhat the number of people I happen to see, but I would be fine with that. I would just as soon they be of more genuine chance.

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