International connections

One of the extraordinary things about the internet is how cyberspace destroys geographic boundaries. I still remember the thrill, when I was a little girl, of receiving a long-distance phone call at our house. It seemed so amazing to think that my parents were able to talk to people continents and oceans away. Email, too, thrills me, in that it's a written communication that arrives instantly at my chosen destination (assuming my server is up to snuff). I'm dating myself, but I still remember when email letters could take a week or two to arrive at their destination. And now, thanks to my Statcounter.com I can discover at any moment, for free, where one hundred of the last visitors to my blog were sitting when they logged onto their computer and checked in. For example, as of five minutes before I posted this very post, my statistics showed this:

73 United States 3 Canada 3 Russian Federation 2 Slovenia 2 Indonesia 1 Italy 1 Iran, Islamic Republic Of 1 Israel

Isn't this amazing? Yes, most hits are from America, but I'm also privileged to have people from all over the world (and some very interesting places in the world, I might add), come explore what I have to say about things. I, of course, have almost as great a thrill (not quite the same, I admit), when I read a blog, and discover that the person is commenting from their perch in Russia, Israel, Iran or Iraq. One would think that, in some utopian way, with so many people able to cross geographic boundaries in an instant, world discord would lessen -- but, sadly, it doesn't seem to work that way. All it seems to do is to allow people to break free of their boundaries to find others who share exactly their world view, for better or worse. Still utopian visions aside, I remain thrilled by the wonders of this technology.