( ・-・) I have no Facebook page, nor Myspace, nor Twitter account, nor a blog of any kind.

This is not because I am some pre-Internet technophobe who fears what he does not understand.

Rather, it is because I am old enough to remember when the WWW was just another competitor to FTP. I remember when colleges and universities would lease one single phone line at 9600 baud for their entire faculty and all their students. I remember BITNET and the online world that existed back when it was a secret a few math and comp sci majors furtively shared. Back when if you put something online, that meant it was important, that people would be interested in it, that it was, perhaps, data pertaining to some cutting-edge research that a group of scientists on different continents were collaborating to perform.

And I still have enough respect for the medium, for the bandwidth that other people are paying for. Email is a one-to-one medium, a personal medium. Email can be as personal and as silly as you and the recipient want, though always recall that email isn't really private and bored sysadmins have been known to read other people's mail.

But the Web is one-to-many, not one-to-one, and that means that it has to be important. It has to be interesting. And nothing in my life is important enough or entertaining enough to justify getting a Livejournal or a Myspace page to blather about my job or my vegetable garden or my new shoes to the whole of civilization. If any of my friends or relatives cares enough they'll ask me in an email. I have that much respect for the medium.

Is it hypocritical to talk about this on an anonymous board? Possibly. But at least I don't have up a Geocities page in which I ramble at great length for page after page about the inaccuracies in translated dialogue from some 1970s anime that was only shown in the US as filler before the Sunday morning church services on some little independent UHF stations in the 1980s. And that must count for something, doesn't it, fellow dokyuns?