I've been thinking recently about how plugged in so many of us actually are. We get our news via RSS readers and podcasts, we shop online, we pay our bills and rent our movies online. I can set my Tivo to record programs while I'm sitting at work. When anything of interest happens to me, such as my recent geocaching expedition, I'm quick to report it on my blog - with pictures if possible. Pictures I've taken with my cell phone. And of course, if I want I can send those pictures directly from my cell phone to someone else's cell phone.
I take joy in reporting my interests and activities to the whole world via this website: what book I'm currently reading and what games I'm playing. I update those whenever I start a new book and whenever I'm playing a new game. I'm particularly proud of the code I wrote to read the rss feed of netflix movies I've got at home and report it in my sidebar. I've even considered adding a progress bar to the book I'm currently reading to show how far through the book I currently am. It'd be easy to write code to show that page 156 out of the 528 pages in Michael Crichton's Next is 29.5% through the book and construct a progress bar. I'd just have to update it nearly daily to show what page I'm on, and I decided that would be too much work.
Why is it that so many people like myself feel this need to share such mundane details? For myself, perhaps it's partially because after having moved out here to Colorado, I've got no close friends locally - my best friends are all back in Connecticut. But I'm far from the only one. You can see it when you look at the appeal Xbox Live holds for other gamers. They're able to participate in online leaderboards and show off achievements in their games. The Xbox Gamer tag reports on the last five games they've played, similar to my own games sidebar. And if you've ever heard of twitter, you know that some people are far more obsessive about reporting on every detail of their lives to anyone online who might care. Which I suspect is far less than the life-reporters might like.
The internet is still a relatively new phenomenon, and this obsessive connectedness is likely just the beginning. Where will things go in ten years? In fifty years? Will we be broadcasting our GPS coordinates? Which TV station we're currently watching? Will students have a setup to automatically report the grades of every paper they turn in? It's hard to even imagine, but none of the above is hard to believe.