Brave new worlds?
I moved to Aroostook County in 2005 to build a house with my husband, Matthew. We were inspired by the idea of homesteading, as we would frequently reflect upon the lives of our colonist ancestors (his: Plymouth Rock, Massachusetts; mine: Westmoreland County, Virginia) and consider ourselves contemporary pioneers building a home with our own hands. Yet, little did we know that, as we cleared land and planed lumber, we were paying homage to our colonial roots in a different way.
Breaking Trail
By Dianna Leighton
It was around 2005 that I fled my coastal colony on Friendster.com for the wild expanses of MySpace. I left behind a humble home of sorts where I only shared a few simple things and spoke only of a small group of close friends from time to time. One rarely spoke of one’s self, lest it be perceived as too heathen.
On the frontiers of MySpace in 2006, we went by imaginary names and lived in slightly larger homes built with whatever we could find: a hastily embedded MP3 here, a treasured YouTube link there, the crinkled bits of HTML code left on the edges of our profile wallpaper. There was space for my father to move in, and perhaps a few former classmates and co-workers too.
But we began to abandon this colony as well, choking under the disease of tainted spam accounts to start a new life in a world crisp white and blue. I moved into Facebook on July 6, 2007, but remained silent until October 3 when, while still unsure of the language, declared, “thinking about Svalbard, radishes, and sharks.” We framed our Facebook walls continuously, with our incoming supply of digital content never ceasing. Ships arrived with hundreds of friends, our bosses, distant family members, local business owners, celebrities, scientists, and anyone else we might need to keep our online sprawl afloat.
Soon, as we see today, we formed not a metropolis … not even a megalopolis … but something near to an ecumenopolis, a term developed in 1967 by city planner Constantinos Doxiadis to describe a single continuous worldwide city. Our Facebook “colony” currently boasts a staggering population of over 845 million (well over twice the population of the United States).
In the time that it has taken my husband and I to build our modest home in the woods, I have built several ones online. Last week, I returned to Friendster to see if my colonial home still stood, only to find it destroyed and replaced by a social gaming site based out of Malaysia. Plymouth had been bulldozed-over to build Las Vegas, with early artifacts and photographs long deleted back in April of last year. All the while, I’m left to wonder: did my colonial ancestors face this?
While snowshoeing during this year’s Aroostook Women’s Ski Day, someone asked, “Who grooms these trails?” The response: “We do. We are making them right now by breaking trail.”
Through future articles, Breaking Trail will begin to examine the ways that Aroostook County traditions merge with social media, pop culture, and the arts to form a better understanding of our world by posing challenging questions and breaking new trails. Thus, I hope you’ll join me as we explore new territories underfoot and under our typing, clicking, swiping, and creating fingertips.
