This is just a short post because I just read a blog post (sorry, can't find it again, it was a link via a link kind of thing) about whether or not facebook and other social networking media have impacted on the number of comments left on a blog and it reminded me of something that happened nearly a year ago that really annoyed me at the time. And it no less irritating now but also fills me with a deep sense of sadness and, in a way, disconnect.
I had spent the Saturday morning working in the garden and it was a fairly heavy duty few hours with lots of shovelling involved. Before leaving the garden I changed my clothes because I was heading straight to the train station to get on a train to go to a colleague's house for a candle party. I met another colleague at the station and we had a nice chat on the way there. The girl we were visiting picked us up at her end and drove us to her house. While we were driving she commented on the big bag I had with me (which had some veg in it from the garden) and I mentioned how getting out in the garden was such a great way to start the day. I was getting into the full swing of describing what it was I had been doing, shovelling old well-rotted manure onto raised beds etc. when one of them said, oh yes, I've done that today as well. And the other chimed in, me too. I was somewhat puzzled, because I didn't know either of them had any garden or connection to a farm and they spent a couple of minutes very enthusiastically talking about cows and chickens and fields before explaining to me exactly what farmville is. Not being on facebook and not being one for online games either, it was the first I'd heard of it. But what really got me was the fact that I was sitting there with aching muscles, dirt under my fingernails but a wonderful feeling of having achieved something and a bag of (probably) cabbage to show for it. And they couldn't have been less interested but managed to spend the rest of the ten minute drive talking about their online farms.
It's a funny old world when the majority of the people I am in contact with in real life on a daily basis, live so much in a virtual world. And yet all of the dozens of people in my life, so to speak, who really live in the real world, digging the soil and connecting directly to the earth (as real as it gets in my view), I mostly only 'know' through the virtual world of the internet. Thank goodness for the biogarten, which at least allows me to know that there really are other people out there in real life, who don't think that clicking twice (or two hundred times or whatever it is) is enough to get a vegetable patch properly fertilised!
7 comments:
Friday (1/28) I am posting an article with links to financial and simple living sites.
I ran across your site and enjoyed your take on things. I have included a link to this site.
Thanks for the link. Look forward to browsing through your blog. Post titles like Don't Die with your Music still in you are catching my attention. :)
Hello there, just found my way here via No Ordinary Homestead I think.. and oh good grief, I am so with you on this. What a hideously depressing story! I am very pleased to have found your blog and am looking forward to reading more :)
It's a strange world we live in where people think clicking fields in Farmville is anything like the real deal. I admit to having been a FV junkie for a while, but to actually think that's real is pretty diluted.
I have some friends that have been encouraged to start their own small gardens after reading my blog, and they proudly brag to me about the tomatoes they harvest and so on. I could not be more pleased. But then there are also the ones that make comments like they can't understand why anyone would ever ground their own flour or bake their own bread, and go to McDonald's to celebrate. Not like what they serve there is even real food! :)
I hadn't really thought of it as depressing until much later. At the time I was just really annoyed. :)
I get a thrill as well anytime someone tells me they've started up a garden and are enjoying their tomatoes or whatever. It makes up for those friends who seem to feel that when I tell them about what I'm doing with my life, I'm trying to force them to do the same and get all defensive before I've done any such thing (because I know I find it really annoying when people try to make me do something, so I really try hard not to come across like that - but at the same time no point in never talking to my friends about my life at all).
Oh what a depressing situation. The very existence of Farmville makes me feel kind of sad, not to mention to amount of time that people I know spend clicking around in their virtual worlds while stuff in our real world remains undone, untouched, undug, unfought for.
I don't know whether to be depressed or to laugh (until I cry tears). I recently got fid of FB and this is a good example of why. I never played Farmville though - I just don't have time or patience for games and feel like I spend enough time online without gaming to add to the list.
On the other hand, I'm looking forward to having a real garden of my own this year. I was hoping to start one last year but being really pregnant made that hard. It will be interesting to see what kind of soil our yard has.
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