I'm afraid that my geekery has reached new heights. All the usual excitement serves as the foundation -- my obsessions with things like flickr and del.icio.us -- but I've been reading and finding a lot more. The internet, really, is just this giant place where you can find more geeks like you to speak geek to, until finally everyone's geekiness is so far concentrated that they're unable to speak reasonably to those outside the geek circle.

I've experienced something like this with the creative writing department at school, where, during the year, all we do is crack jokes about poetry or ask who's read so and so or make terrible parodies of William Carlos William's "This is just to say" a la that one show of "Prairie Home Companion." We admire each other's emulations of "Where are the waters of childhood?" and steal each other's titles or write other versions of poignant lines. We discuss NPR (especially "This American Life") like you'd expect teenagers to be discussing television. And so I am shocked when, like Friday at Matthew's birthday party, someone has never heard of David Sedaris, doesn't even know who he is, doesn't have a handful of signed books lying around in their room. Or when trying to explain to my mother who Beth-Ann Fennelly is, she's completely unphased by the name Tom Franklin, can't feel his Southern gothic genius flicker through the air at the drop of his name. "Well, everyone has their own little world," she says. "You've just found yours sooner than most people." And thank god people like Franklin are in it.

But during the summer, when I have more than a handful of wee hours to spend online, the internet takes over. It is like my own system of fallow farmland; during the school year I grow writing and literature, and during the summer I grow blogs, cultivate the crop of the internet. (This, as we have seen, doesn't always mean that rocket-fish sees any improvement.)

So I found this -- a proposed, not-yet-real social software system for watching television. Like TiVO, you can program and rewind and record, but it's sort of like watching television online -- you can see what your friends are watching, even watch them watching television, and talk to them during commercial breaks.

I remember the days of dial-up when, save for chatrooms or what few people I could find on AIM, the internet was a solely anti-social activity. Either blogs hadn't really hit or I hadn't been properly introduced to them. In fact, I think I spent most of my time playing Petz and "hexing" files to create new breeds of virtual dogs. I remember discovering Javascript via some girl's website and thinking how complicated it was. Those were the days of FrontPage2000 and ListBot. Remember ListBot? This was all during a period of poor health for me, so the countless days spent home from school were (at least partially) passed holed up in front of the computer, waiting for images to download and palaces to load. (That's right -- my geekery extends back to avatar chatrooms. Anyone else have any shameful early internet activity to confess?)

But now all that anti-social activity has become something more like the wallscreens in Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 -- a way of communicating through a medium that's probably even more revolutionary and strange than the telephone. Who ever thought we'd be talking into plastic or running our fingers over keys and communicating anything? I mean, really -- what a weird idea. Finally all this newfangled stuff seems to have a practicle use, when just a few years ago it seemed we could do a lot but without much use. Now we have things like webcasts and video conferences, but it gets down to even smaller things like seeing the trail of breadcrumbs someone leaves on the internet via del.icio.us, syndicating links and subscribing to RSS feeds so that you can read everything in one place (sort of like an internet newspaper), or even hearing someone's voice via podcast instead of reading a bunch of text on a screen. I still worry that plain old dinner conversation will become underrated -- that sitting still and listening to someone's voice tumble over food on a table for hours at a time will seem strange, especially with the hyped-up ADHD tendencies of my generation. But overall this social software explosion is really exciting, really interesting.

I hope you'll bear with me as my excitement spills over into these long, perhaps abstract (depending on your familiarity with the topic) posts. The surplus has to end up somewhere.