From the Editor

One day you may find yourself feeling lonely and all alone because the cell phone does not call you to answer, or just that everyone else seems to be on call and so well connected to some significant presences that must be elsewhere, and here you are without a thing in your ear, or a voice to say hello.  At least you may feel that way one day, when the whole of the planet seems to be talking all at once to someone somewhere else. That is the day you discover life has become virtual, and your presence is not required.  In fact, a disembodied presence seems to be the preferred discourse of the day -- cell phone calls and text messages, teleconferences, conference blogs, black board discussions, distance education ad continuum – not to mention 900 phone numbers and long distance relationships -- we’re living more cyber-ly safe and sober everyday.

And more connected? Is human contact any less real if it comes at you in compressed electromagnetic waves?  Well, I don’t know, how can you tell?  I once had an intimate relationship with someone named Karen who lived in Idaho, she sent me a picture on the internet, and I believed everything that Karen said, but now that it’s over, I believe her name might have been Deborah for all I really know.

It is not a bad thing, this electronic web word thing we’re doing with our lives.  Multi-tasking and conveniencing the heck out of life. Isn’t that a good thing?  Mass injecting lost illusions back into our lives with the language code over great distances, isn’t that good?  We should be more than thankful for that.  In fact, the truth in a blog or a facebook page, by sheer ubiquity and vast number, is beginning to carry the weight of fact; however electronically flimsy the facts may be.

And "virtual" may be virtuous, who knows?  It's laughable that I might know the difference.  I am certainly not homophonically phobic to think the two words aren’t related in some way. 

For the better part of every night I am hoping that "virtual" is indeed virtuous, and the library still has their books intact, to be held and fondled and read with sincere intimate interest.  Since the internet ouroboros has wormed its way into academia like a hideous strength that can’t be denied or treated with enough  pyrantel pamoate that you can get relatively cheap down at Pet Smart, I am not completely sure about anything.  The library as a keeper of books may be changing into one great internet café, and the book as physical artifact, no longer valued as it used to be.  Our own Joyner Library is undergoing a massive re-design plan that will limit the once grand centerpiece of the traditional library -- books.   After all, the bottom line is that most information needed to get a good grade can be googled.

In many ways, books are "virtual" too -- the reading of them is of other places, other times, other lives, and we are transported there through language -- yet there is something more individual, more private to our conscience that occurs in reading that does not occur during a blog, or a text message.  There is a physical to the felt in the moment taken to reflect when you put the book down, the silence of not reading, that makes a book another kind of wave, some virtue that cannot be replaced, or even badly imitated in the virtual world.