Ley Lines

I've pondered quite a bit these past few days about the Internet, social networking, and how there are some people who are rebelling against the stupidity that are things like the List of 25 Things About Me on Facebook, the useless futility of being one of a hundred million bloggers and our growing inability to separate civil discourse from snark.

Then I got to thinking: Ley lines.

Ley lines -- hypothetical alignments of a number of places of geographic or archaeologic interest -- were first postulated, at least in our day, by Englishman Alfred Watkins, who came up with all sorts of mystical alignments between archaeological sites in England in the early 1920s. He believed, and many do today, that these alignments were not of mere chance, but that Site A aligned with Sites B, C, and D because the ancients found, or believed to have found, a line of power that, if strung with beads of archaeological significance, would impart some of that power to the sites, and thus to humanity.

I don't know that I believe all of that. But using the concept of ley lines, I can look at the Internet in a different way. We're not all brilliant here by any measure of the word. But through our blogs, our social networks, our inane comments on YouTube and our useless attempts at convincing others to accept our world view on any number of message boards and comment sites, we're creating our own Internet ley line. We're trying to line up our artifacts to form some kind of mystical connection to a world that remains as large as it was when Columbus sailed the ocean in 1492. Sure, we can cross the Atlantic in seconds now, but only in the sense of spitting a few hundred thousand electrons that way.

Where am I going with all this? Nowheres in particular. I'm still here at home, reaching out to intersect with your ley line. Or are we not supposed to cross the streams?