The Internet is a strange place, largely because it’s not a place. As a society we reference it as a place because that’s how we’re used to referencing things with addresses.

It makes things easier.

There are ways in which it is like a place – a separate country, born of optimistic ideas that re-awaken every now and then, increasingly divorced from the reality that is there if only so that we can hope that one day we can change that reality. Because if we change reality, we might somehow matter. We want to matter, some of us more than others, but we all want to matter.

Whether we do or don’t matter really doesn’t matter. Whether we think we do or don’t matter really does matter only because it’s about how we view ourselves. And how should we view ourselves?

The Internet has changed that. I’ve seen it happen so far, and I’m certain it will continue changing it one way or another.

As it happens, I got here by looking for old links of some of my writing. They are gone.

For less than a heartbeat, I was disappointed. My writing over the years on various sites, from BrainBuzz.com (later CramSession.com) to WorldChanging.com has disappeared into the ether – some words rewritten in book form by others. My own site, the domain that has been around the longest, suffered a hosting error circa 2005 that it never recovered from.

I, however, did.

And it’s all good. I smiled at that, knowing that much of what I wrote was dated and didn’t matter anymore. We scribble these notes to nowhere and let them loose in the hope that they find a home – maybe they do, maybe they don’t.

This medium lacks the longevity of stone tablets. With every increase of technology, our words become more susceptible to time – a balance, perhaps, with the amount of effort it takes to reach a wider audience. Tapping away here at 4 a.m., having effortlessly stayed up the night thinking about such things, I am fine with this mortality of prose.

Were I to spend time etching in stone, it would last longer – I would write less. And yet, in writing less we sometimes write more.

Those broken links are a salvation of sorts. They were practice for me to become better, to think things through, to etch more carefully into the ultimate medium – the mind.

It is there that we can defy this mortality of words – a necessary aspect of our being. Only the good things should last, only the good things are worth keeping.

Dreams are ethereal for a reason. They do not belong here.

What we do with those wisps of dream is all that matters – and sometimes it means broken links in the stream of a consciousness that our society dares not master.

We simply fill voids.