Pick up the phone if you want to reconnect

My Internet connection went down recently. Normally, this would provoke a hopping mad rage against my Internet service. In this case, I was piggybacking off some stranger's unsecured network who, for some reason, suddenly turned his router off.

Maybe he left town, maybe he was murdered in a jealous rage by his wife's lover, maybe I should cut back on Law and Order marathons. I don't know. What I do know is I've been disconnected to "the world" and only in the daily trudges to the local cafe with Wi-Fi do I once again feel a part of the community.

We have a greater awareness of each other through the Internet; we bond, we share, we communicate with more people now than in the previous 100 years. But in reflection I think it's isolated us in ways that seem incidental but add up to a widening social gulf.