Glass houses

College campus are historical - every generation leaving some sort of mark. I marvel at the overall campus plan - near a lake, on the banks of a river, among rolling hills; the inclusion of parks and quads – carefully tended, leaves raked, trees planted and benches placed in memory of someone important. I have wandered down countless wide stone paths, glancing at old, sturdy buildings interspersed with structures that appear to be made predominantly of glass. The old ones are my favorites - the high arches and gorgeous stone or brick work, the gracious windows within imposing, bulky structures that often house classrooms and offices with aging heating systems and leaky pipes. Renovations are careful, in my experience, to upgrade without changing the overall structure - these buildings represent an important time in the life of a university and are usually preserved as pieces of history.

The mark that we're leaving now is one of glass - easy access to information, an almost constant ability to see in and out through floor to ceiling windows, doors that open automatically to admit you. Glass and concrete homages to the present.

As I walked through the campus where I'm currently employed, I noted the disparity. I slowed to note the decorative elements over the point of an arch that covered 4 wooden doors. Exquisite, elegant, impressive. I wandered more quickly past the building with windows that were too small and too high to be functional for anything other than letting a bit of light in. It looked like a fortress, I mused. Was it trying to keep people in or out?

Turning a corner past bare trees, altering my path a bit to avoid the men blowing leaves, I faced the biomedical library. It must be a relatively new addition to campus - floor to ceiling windows supported sparingly with slender cement elements. While inside searching for your book or journal, you can always see outside - watch the people and cars, note the weather, monitor the progression of day into night.

But outside, walking briskly through the cold morning air, my purse tucked neatly under one arm and a bottle of water swinging from the opposite hand, I look in. I see some students glancing out – pausing a moment to reflect on their reading, others bustling toward copy machines and scanners to make certain knowledge more portable. I love libraries - the muffled quiet that is disturbed only by sparse requests for help and the tapping of computer keys. But the information there is aging - the new facts and their interpretations are found online - downloaded easily to a printer or glanced over on a screen. I don't spend much time in the library - making the trip only when something is too old to be found in the online archives. The sancity of knowledge, for better or worse, has been compromised in order to make it more freely available.

The world of online journals is yet another symptom of our mark on society. Information, private thoughts and feelings, details of your life you might not otherwise share - are now public. There's something liberating in putting the information out there. I don't know anything about the people who stop by here - have no idea of what impression they carry when they leave. And because I won't meet them, I guess it doesn't particularly matter. I write things down, and maybe someone reads them. You sit in a building with walls of glass and maybe someone watches you. The lack of control could be a little exciting if it wasn't so normal. And if it’s a bit disconcerting at first, I quickly adjusted and now am quite comfortable noting the small increases in traffic.

And secrets – personal, professional, political - rarely exist for long. In a society filled with members who are accustomed to satiating any fleeting curiosity, the thought of not being allowed to know something is foreign and unappealing. But with the steady flow of information, thoughts, ideas, the critical interpretations can get lost in the noise. If there's a signal that represents truly valuable knowledge, how can it possibly rise above all the chatter that exists not only in the huge body of scientific literature, but in the news, on blogs where writers are still figuring themselves out, trying to make sense of the world around them, but sometimes getting things wrong.

But this glass world that exists online fascinates me. I watched less television and bought fewer books in the last 3 months than I have since getting a job at 16. I wasn’t working more – I was online, impressed with the speed of my cable modem and enjoying the few blogs that I had found in my later days of grad school, when I was desperate for any kind of distraction. But those blogs lead to others – sometimes whole communities of people with riveting stories of family, dating, children, difficulty in conceiving one, work ... life. While I know that I’m only getting part of the author – often the most negative as these journals provide a place to vent – to release all the rage and irritation that we subdue in order to function in this society. But I’ve gotten to know people – I read what they write and consider it, I hope good things for them, I’ve cried over bad news.

It’s basically entertainment though. Whether a reflection of someone’s reality or a well-crafted story, I don’t see how it matters, but there is a sense that scripted drama is no long sufficient to hold my attention. Instead I prefer snippets – stories that are impacted by events that I can sometimes relate to, the puzzle of interpreting some words and deciding what they mean while appreciating a particular phrase.

There’s this ability to look out from my own space – one where I’ve made smaller margins to fool you into thinking my posts aren’t quite so lengthy – and watch my words, sometimes edited several times – enter the world. Then peer over site statistics and wonder over who came to see my work – did they find something interesting? Stay to read another post? Understand what I was trying to say? Become distracted for a moment? Then I wander farther – through diaries of women trying to build families, highly-educated people forming careers; laugh over bad blind date stories, and sigh when someone’s in love, become indignant when someone’s brother-in-law is a jackass, and wonder whether a homeless man found his bags.

But it leaves me wanting more. I’ve been completely disappointed when some people stop writing. I’m completely invested in your story! You can’t just leave! At least give me some sort of season finale! But there is no predictability – no way of saying “there are 10 minutes left in the program so some sort of resolution is coming soon”. My parents watch the last 15 minutes of Walker, Texas Ranger. Dad says you get to watch him kick the crap out of the bad guy, then see that everything’s fine in the end. But with blogs, you read as people go along – making decisions, finding their balance after a stumble, dealing with heartbreak and disappointment, and examining their lives and how they are turning out. And yes, people become characters. Some offer comic relief – I read archives if I’m particularly in need of laughter. Another is heroic and his claims to the contrary only make him fit more neatly in that role for me. There are some tragic characters, but with too much strength and talent to dismiss them with sympathy. I follow their stories closely – fascinated with their struggles and confident in an eventual happy ending.

As I turn people’s lives into little more than a daily 5 minute break from my own, I feel more interested in the people around me. Yes, you’re learning Spanish because you’re painfully bored at your job. But what do you wish you’d done differently? Stayed with your husband? Finished your degree? Not switched jobs so many times? I know you’re trying to prove you’re smart when you say you’ve studied my textbooks. Is that covering insecurity? Or are you trying to make me more comfortable? That librarian is helpful – good at her job. Is she happy with her husband? Does she go home to blog about all the irritating college students who are rude to her during the day? Does she have a plan for a different job? That guy I walked past on my way to my car after work looked vacant. Did he lose someone special to him? Is he sick? Does he have somewhere warm to sleep tonight?

As this curiosity burns, fanning the flicker by learning more about those who live on my bookmark list, will I eventually just start to ask? Abandon all sense of social grace and start demanding the information for entertainment – something to think about to make my day a little more interesting? Expect that any curiosity be satisfied quickly and easily? Because already reading what people give you isn’t enough – commenters have questions, topics in mind, requests for more information and clarity. The police are studying friendster profiles in a murder case – looking over information these teenagers put into a public forum for insight into their character and motives. And it’s out there – protected only by the sheer number of people and the sense of privacy you have when nobody knows for sure that you’re writing it.

Where are we going with this? The constant flow of information, the ability to always see in and out, ask questions and expect answers, know intimate details of other people’s lives? It’s interesting – having a generation who will rely more on CDs and online archives rather than encyclopedias. One that will feel even more entitled to every bit of information that might be available. But I participate even now. I’m going to share details – thoughts that don’t exist for me anywhere but here.

Looking in the window at me? The screenshot above is part of my desktop at work. There’s no real reason to show it to the world, but no real reason not to. I went into work late today - the roads were icy. I came home early - some kids were tormenting my dog through the fence and I wanted to be home to protect her and shoo them away. I got my IRB done and found some articles at the library. And I was preoccupied with writing this out, worried over my aunt and uncle who are moving this week, talked to some people at work, answered some personal email, and now I'm watching Gilmore Girls. It's the only show I never miss, and I forgot to change the channel as I was here making a point. It's a rerun. But you probably already knew that.