This morning, the Internet connected me to my friends, although today the News was mostly bad. Firstly, some friends of mine and I are planning to get together tomorrow and I was figuring out what time to meet. I emailed my friends at ten twenty two am, to say ‘Let's meet at six pm'. At ten thirty five am, one of them emailed me back that he'd been downsized, and so could make it as early as we liked. I emailed my condolences, glad for the speed and ease when connecting with my friends via the Internet. His email at quarter to nine am said nothing about being downsized so he must only have found out about it this morning, less than two hours before he told us.



Before telephones and computers came to be, swift communication would have been reserved for only those who could afford to send letters to each other and employ messenger boys. Although on the other hand, before England had telephones I gather the mail service was so efficient that you could send an invitation at breakfast, and expect a letter in response the same day. Even that doesn't compare with getting an answer in thirteen minutes, and learning about major events in a friend's life in less than two hours.

After receiving that bad News, and then my small consolation of joy at being so connected to my friends, I read more bad News in another friend's blog and discovered that I'm less connected than I thought. My blogger friend is worried he suffers from depression and might be an alcoholic. According to his blog he can't talk to his friends about it, including me. I wonder if he knows that some of his friends read his blog. Like most blog pages this one allows comments so I anonymously offered some advice and encouraged him to talk to his friends. I'm curious if what I said will give away who I am. Later on I had a discussion about him and his blog with another friend over a messenger program.

Sadly the world is both kind and cruel, filled with both joy and sorrow. So, if you can connect with anyone, anywhere, anytime, you will get bad News as quickly and clearly as you get good News. Although you will, I hope, always get good News more often.