No person is an island, at least not on the internet
A notorious British politician known as the Iron Lady once uttered the icy words: 'There is no such thing as society.' What followed was a decade or two of rampant self-interest.
Now, egomania is out. Welcome to the communitarian era known as the participation age, to use the phrase broadcast by Sun Microsystems boss Scott McNealy. Even westerners, known for their atomised individuality, are all members of one big, wired tribe.
We want to keep in touch and gain strength from the new connectedness fostered by an array of technologies. E-mail, in particular, is an amazingly effective way of binding individuals together. Who is not part of an e-mail chain or two used for the dissemination of jokes, subversive ideas (journalism) and even the occasional flippant, low-level flame war?
My inbox contains chain messages concerned with everything from global warming to the names of Snow White's seven dwarves to a Bondi barbecue. The throng even contains an attached mpeg depicting a jet-pack-clad man prone on an office chair shooting into a barrel of oranges, making juice.
Also, there are the spam-like curiosities whose origin I can scarcely fathom, such as a 'kiss' from a defunct dating site and swathes of business contacts who have wangled their way into my domain via an experts' database.
Open to everyone, social groups pinned on networking software abound - think MySpace, Shagster and Meetup.com. The groups mean that nobody need be lonely any more in the real world - violent sociopaths of both sexes, even those sporting beards, can now find a captive audience.
No longer is there any excuse for botched meetings where you arrange to see someone at a certain place and they fail to show up. You can chase them - almost stalk them - via the mobile phone. The downside is that even in the darkest corner of a Shanghai nightclub, your mother can track you down.
The new generation hunts in packs. Friends are supposedly the new extended family, partly because many come from dysfunctional families.
Some bosses are toying with hiring groups rather than individuals. Others are accepting that in the workplace of the future established distinctions between work and play are set to go the way of overtime pay.
Even research is becoming a social activity. Witness the astounding success of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia devised and edited by you. The breadth of input speaks volumes. Wikipedia offers much more depth and colour than uptight fact books such as Encarta and Britannica.
Just look at the entry on the Battle of Ramree Island, the six-week clash in 1945 in Burma between the Japanese and the British. A sprawling entry, it is equipped with this striking quote. 'That night [of February 19,1945] was the most horrible that any member of the ML [marine launch] crews ever experienced. The scattered rifle shots in the pitch black swamp, punctured by the screams of wounded men crushed in the jaws of huge reptiles, and the blurred worrying sound of spinning crocodiles made a cacophony of hell that has rarely been duplicated on earth. At dawn the vultures arrived to clean up what the crocodiles had left ... Of about 1,000 Japanese soldiers that entered the swamps of Ramree, only about 20 were found alive.'
Contrast that entry with Encarta's. 'We could not find any results containing Battle of Ramree Island. Consider: Battle of Ramee Island,' the oracle said.
Wikipedia has more scope than its established rival. Better yet, it offers information on topical subjects such as New Horizons, the unmanned Nasa spacecraft designed to fly by Pluto and its moons, and beam images and data back to Earth.
Wikipedia exemplifies the wisdom of crowds. Broadly speaking, the more sources that contribute to a text, the richer it grows. The same may apply to our social lives - the more friends we have, the better we feel - it is in the genes. We are indeed pack animals.
The image of the lone information-age geek tapping symbols into a void is at odds with reality. No matter how hard we try, there is no escape from society.
