Internet brings whole world into the loop

From the very first time I logged onto the Internet years ago and discovered how easy it was to click myself around the globe, I’ve marveled at the dizzying changes in modern communication.

People now talk freely with people they would never have known existed in another era, and can never hope to actually meet in this one. For good or bad, anyone with a computer can now spend hours telling everyone else on the planet precisely what’s on his or her mind. Whether there’s any merit in all this random sharing of opinion among strangers is probably beside the point. People do it simply because they can, I guess, which seems to be the rationale for much of our technological innovation.

Which brings me to the e-mail I got recently from a man in New Zealand. I have no idea who he is — wouldn’t know him from Robinson Crusoe. I can’t even pronounce the name of the town he lives in without sounding like a cat coughing up a hairball. But the man obviously felt comfortable enough to write to me about the lovely weather he was having and the migratory habits of the birds of the South Pacific. All, by the way, without a hint as to how he came to read something I wrote half a world away.

“Enjoy reading your articles,” he signed off. “Good luck.”

His farewell was perplexing, coming as it did from so far outside the traditional circulation area of this newspaper. A letter from an appreciative reader in Dover-Foxcroft or Rockland or Fort Kent can brighten my day immeasurably. I know their towns, and can almost imagine their faces. A compliment from a stranger in New Zealand, pleasant as it is, throws me for a loop.

Same for the missives I’ve gotten from California, New York, Michigan or any other distant locale where a Web surfer with no apparent connection to Maine will find this newspaper’s home page, read something I’ve written, then see fit to tell me what they think of it.

“I’ve never been to Maine,” said an e-mail I got a while back from North Carolina, “but your column on Christmas trees reminded me …”

It’s one heck of a deal, actually: For a monthly Internet fee, people can now enjoy the cyberspace equivalent of having newspapers from every small corner of the world delivered to their doorsteps each day — crossword puzzles included. Why they would read the ramblings of local columnists hundreds of miles from where they live, or how they find the time, are questions I may never be able to answer.

When I mention this curious journalistic phenomenon to friends, they figure I must be thrilled by the newfound attention from afar. Sometimes I am. I remind them, however, that it comes with a price. Being called a moron by an angry stranger in Atlanta the first thing Monday morning is not a good way to start the week.

But that’s what happened when I dared to make light of the paranoia surrounding the millennium computer bug. The e-mail on that column was abundant, and some of it hostile. It came from all over the country — from Texas, New York, New Mexico, Florida. Everywhere, that is, but from the Maine people I had in mind when I wrote it.

It’s always been said that a good newspaper knows its readers well. That rule still applies to those who actually buy the paper, the faces we writers hold firmly in mind as we hammer out our deathless prose. The online version drifting out there in cyberspace, however, is subject to puzzling new forces that will take some getting used to.

Back in the old days, I never knew exactly who I was going to offend or amuse or nauseate from one day to the next. Now, I can’t even be sure what countries they live in.