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                             The Plug-in Society

Spring [1] and I were talking about moving. Okay, so we are still in the
throes of a move [2] so it's not a conversation about moving from were we
just moved. No, we were talking about moving in general and why it seems that
so many people we know just up and move to a new location, usually far away
from where they currently are.

Me, I'm having trouble moving less than five miles away, and here I have
friends that have moved cross country, some more than once! Then there's the
paternal side of my family—I have three aunts (Dad's sisters) that all live
within two miles of the home they grew up in, and the youngest sister lived
in the same house with her husband and two kids for fifteen years, so staying
in one place seems to run in the family as it were.

Spring seems to think that most people (of our age, maybe a bit older) are of
a “plug-in society,” which is a concept from John Brunner's book The
Shockwave Rider (which incidently, is considered the first book in the
cyberpunk genre of Science Fiction). Our culture is so homogenized that one
can pick up and move from Seattle, Washington [3] to Ft. Lauderdale, Florida
[4] and not feel out of place. Even though Seattle and Ft. Lauderdale are
over three thousand miles apart, they are very similar—similar stores,
similar restaurants, similar weather.

Okay, so we don't have a billionaire software mogul living here in Lower
Sheol, but we do have a billionaire garbage mogul with a taste in baseball
teams and video store outlets in the form of Wayne Huizinga.

Okay, so maybe there is no difference there either.

It might very well be that since there is no difference between Seattle or
Ft. Lauderdale or Los Angeles [5] or Boston [6] then does it really matter
where one lives? Or perhaps it could be the perception that life would be
better in New York [7] or South Bend [8] or Houston [9] so why not give it a
try since the three or four years we've been here has shown this city to be
just another homogenized suburban sprawl or rural backwater town or faceless
urban monster of a city. Or perhaps given the relative ease with which we can
move gives rise to the “plug-in society.”

Or all the above.

[1] http://www.springdew.com/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/1Phlog:2002/02/09
[3] http://www.ci.seattle.wa.us/
[4] http://ci.ftlaud.fl.us/
[5] http://www.ci.la.ca.us/
[6] http://www.ci.boston.ma.us/
[7] http://www.nyc.gov/
[8] http://www.ci.south-bend.in.us/
[9] http://www.ci.houston.tx.us/

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