At 8:00am local time, on a train on his way to work in Tokyo, my brother emails me a picture of his new girlfriend from using his mobile phone. It pops up in my inbox in Manchester whilst I’m talking to an old schoolfriend who now lives in Boston, USA. I reply to my brother expressing my approval of his choice in ladies, and he replies to me recommending some strange Japanese post-punk industrial extreme hardcore band he saw last night. At the same time, Cathy and I are arguing the morality of animal testing from the perspective of a vegetarian. For a short while, from the comfort of my sofa in Manchester, my world spans nearly two-thirds of the way around the globe and covers 13 hours of timezone difference. The world is simultaneously enormous and tiny, and even though I’ve got a pretty good idea of how most of it works, the sheer scale of the internet never ceases to amaze me.
I [heart] teh internet. Although my online world doesn’t stretch as far across the globe as yours, it’s still ace.