Lonely internet

In the year 2000, at the age of 45, I got my first computer. My excitement was tremendous. It was, what, a 15 gig hard drive, 64 megs of ram. I thought I had it all. I was on top of the world. In 1992, Bill Clinton referred to a coming "information superhighway", and I didn't know what he meant. Now, I was becoming part of it.

I ended up on aol, and jumped into the chat room scene, which was booming. Within a short time I had more friends and girlfriends than I had ever dreamed possible. I was excited.

But just how "real" was it? We traded pictures and conversation, with people all over the country.
Groups of people congregated in chatrooms, familiar people in familiar chatrooms, forming online cliques. At one point I was part of a chatroom group which called itself  "the family."

Several women from the internet came to visit me, usually resulting in awkward, often truncated visits. Eleven years later, I can still vaguely remember some of the screen names and other things about a few of the people involved, but for the most part its all just a blurry memory. I understand that chatrooms ar a dying breed, as is aol. What happened? Did the comsumers simple get tired of it, and walk away, like I did?

I will always kinda wonder whatever happened to those folks. They probably went ahead with their lives, and eventually lost interest in the online social life. Many of them were looking for mates; I hope and trust they found what they were looking for.

Now, it seems to me that the internet is no less lonely than America in real space and time. Like being alone in a crowd. Could it be that the only answer to loneliness is small, stable communites which change little over time? Perhaps our ancestors had it right all along.