We live and work in this World. A special existence. Dual. Intangible and yet, how real. How ironic!

We watch it from a different reality. We communicate with voices distorted by the modern technology. We listen to other distorted voices in our headphones and we seem not to care about such details: because the person speaking is far but real, because it’s the message that matters. Then we want to associate a face with a name, a face with a voice and fortunately, technology has solutions even for such problems: a jpg file, an mpeg or a live cam. Yes, we can hear and see each other. But we cannot touch each other. We cannot hold hands and we cannot lean on each other when destiny calls for such measures. No warm fingers will wipe our tears and no hand to hold out and reach for another hand. Not really. Not like we’d want it to be. But different. Metaphorically different, paradoxically cold even when the passion of the feeling warms our own hearts. Even then… there’s something we cannot touch. Something missing. How depressing!

This world makes communication easy. Fast.

This world comes with a price: addiction, professional illness (RSI), identity theft… But this world comes with its wonders too. From zero to hero in a matter of hours, with a good story that makes it to the front page at digg.

And then, with a strange exhibitionist act, our most private thoughts become public. Our souls are open to be read and know by all those who stumble upon our pages. And they end up knowing more about ourselves than we do.

These are now our friends. We turn to them for help. We turn to them when we feel lonely. We don’t need something else. And probably they don’t need much either, because, well… because this World is eating us up, this World dictates what we should do, when to do it and how. And we don’t even realize the danger anymore. We don’t feel how we lose our essence. We don’t feel how our friends from the “real world” grow into strangers. We don’t… because we don’t see them anymore. We just hear their voices distorted by the modern technology. We just talk to them with a distorted voice…

The others, our new friends, can’t join us for coffee in the real world. So we’ve even invented virtual coffees, to make up for the lack of reality in the virtual reality.

We send virtual kisses and virtual hugs. And when the network is down, when our DSL provider fails, our whole universe fails too. We are lost. We don’t know what to do. We are not free, but caught. How bizarre!

And how easy it is to denigrate or to praise in this World. How easy to offend and get offended. How easy to play house and to play with other people’s feelings.

How easy to “find a date” who probably has ten other dates, but we’ll never know anything about it, and we’ll not even care, because the World doesn’t let us to. The World finds excuses for all… It’s the World of “anonymous”, “user name” and avatars.

In this World real people using real names are easy targets. We say Kathy Sierra and we weep. Then we are angry at the World and we ask questions. Then the World silences us and we don’t even notice what and when it happened. Because the World knows better. It brings other questions in front of us and we type, faster and faster, about everything we can think off. But while we do… we forget.

This World is the world of forgetting. This World is the world of remembering. How convoluted!

In this World, to talk about the events of the day is passé. And we cannot predict the future, can we? We are no prophets, are we? We are no fortune-tellers. But we can, helplessly, repeat the ideas of the others, give them new shapes and new meanings and if we are skilled enough we can even give them value.

This World has no borders. It’s the World of an illusory freedom and the World governed by Time. It’s a World influenced by trends, and a World in which the highest values bear names like traffic, SEO, ROI…

In this World to keep up with the pace of the others, we need to be there first, read that news first, comment upon it first… We need to build up communities and create passionate users. We need to manipulate.

And we don’t like the sound of that. We don’t really like the truth, do we? How distressing!

We are the prisoners of this World. But we don’t feel the chains.

We are lost into this World, but it feels like we find our essence, just because of that illusory freedom that keeps us in the same place while we travel around thousands of other worlds within the same World, while we navigate on unseen seas…

In this World we could create millions of dreams, other worlds and other realities.

This is the World of “Make it Happen” and it is also the World where, if we fail, no one will remember it. As no one will remember our success.

It’s the World of the ephemerae. In this World no one will feel our pain if we don’t want to. No one will feel our joy, unless we talk about it.

There’s no blood here, and no seeable wounds. Our nerves and faces are but an amorphous mass of kilobytes. This is the World in which we proudly call ourselves WHAMs and freelancers. This is the World we could even call our gatekeeper, and if… if this World will disappear tomorrow, we will all face a Global catastrophe of unemployment, famine and more. How frightening!

This World inspires, this World entertains. This World is alpha and omega for many of us. We always say this World has no borders. Because some of us even find love in it.

There is but one thing that will never happen in this World: the birth of a child.