Yesterday, a childhood neighbor now living in the UK used a messaging app to share a 21-second clip of a game of musical chairs we played with her sister when we were four and five years old. I didn’t win and I looked skyward before plopping down histrionically. I hadn’t thought of that experience in at least 50 years, and I’m 60.
“I love how, apparently...your own beloved daughter is talking in the background—and is older than we were then,” I replied.
“She had gone to get in her pj’s and was scared to miss out on anything!!!! How lovely is this...she watched...and said, “Oh, I wish I was there with you and I also wish I lived when there was no technology.” Ironic because if there were no “technology,” chances are, Helene wouldn’t have shared that home-movie clip with me. I got Helene’s daughter’s point, though: Would the three of us even have played musical chairs back then if there had been colorful screens to stare at?
This morning, at our synagogue’s Shabbat services, Christine Scheinberg gave a beautiful d’var Torah on Parshat Vayigash. “Vayigash” means, “And he approached,” or “And he drew near.” She included references to two Jewish philosophers, Emannuel Levinas and Martin Buber, both of whom were fans of face-to-face interaction. What would the two think about social media?
I hope they’d get not only its hazards, but also its affordances, a term my fellow IBM alum, Chuck Hamilton taught me to use. For instance, not every IBMer gets to go on a short- or long-term international assignment, but through virtual-world technology, all can interact immersively with one another no matter the location, and build cultural intelligence in a lower-stakes way. They can make cultural gaffes without causing international incidents and can be corrected by the colleague in the other country without losing face the way they might if the experience had happened in person.
I’m not suggesting virtual-world technology could lead to world peace...or am I?... but before anyone pooh-poohs such interactions, they might ask which is better: zero, immersive access to colleagues in other cultures or relatively inexpensive, immersive access for all?
Wow, I didn’t expect to wax on about the virtues of virtual worlds on a Saturday night in 2025. All of that virtual-world technology was at its hottest from the early-mid 2000s. Still, just because something goes out of fashion doesn’t mean its utility is gone.
I’m thinking of fashion and in-person vs. virtual experiences, this evening, also after reading two NYT articles:
The fashion critic who wrote the guest essay yearned for a time when people experimented and created their own styles essentially by first flirting with fashion, not by throwing mindless electronic cash at it. Filling an online cart with fantasy-fashions, she wrote, was a poor substitute for having in-person conversations with retail experts followed by trying on the clothing, then choosing it as consciously as a costume exhibit museum curator—I’m interpreting here.
What about during the height of Covid-inspired lockdowns globally? I thought, I might not live long enough to wear new clothes, but also, I have nothing precious to lose by giving myself some easy pleasure before I go. I visited the website of a favorite British brand and ordered four special-kind-of-cotton, gorgeously printed, button-down blouses. While I was at it, I went to the website of an American brand I had admired since childhood, but had never worn due to their super-bold colors, and I bought a pile of skorts, shirts, and pants.
Everything fit well and I’m still enjoying all of the items despite not having had the treat of advice from an in-person expert.
In the second article, the Business reporter wrote about the “last gasps” of Sears, which took me back to the early years of my career. Sears still operates five stores, but down from 3,400. I worked as a tech writer for Sears Technology Services, the technology arm of Sears, Roebuck and Co. before transferring to IBM when Pat & I moved to Montclair, New Jersey for her Montclair State University CFO job.
Lars Johnson, Werner Weiss, and I designed a home page prototype for Sears in 1995 and thought we were really clever by using, <H2>Come see the cyber side of Sears</H2>, but Sears did not embrace online ordering until after Amazon emerged, and it was too late by then, as the article discussed. For younger readers, I should offer the context that at the time, Sears had a big ad campaign running: “Come see the softer side of Sears” to attract customers to items other than refrigerators.
Nerd alert: <H2> was the more conventional way of signifying a level-2 heading in HTML back then, rather than <h2>.
Then there’s theatre, which I’ve jumped into over the past five years. What’s better than live theatre in a theatre? Nothing, and yet...
First, I wrote all alone, kind of liberated by the thought that no one might ever see the play if Covid never abated. I was free to write anything. Who cared?
When vaccines became available, a fellow congregant and I met at the Shabbat dinner of a third congregant and she said, “I know another lesbian playwright. She used to be my neighbor. Would you like to meet her?”
“Yes!” The playwright, The Rev. Elaine Blanchard, introduced me to Voices of the South, the theatre company that runs the online Writers’ Workshop I’ve been attending every Monday night for the past three years. If we weren’t online, I’d never have gotten such close mentoring by more advanced playwrights, including Keegon Schuett, who joins from Chicago each Monday. Keegon won the 2024 Yale Drama Prize.
Who’s to say what’s more profound: face-to-face experiences or online experiences with people from anywhere in the world? Which is better? I think the answer is Yes.
