Change of Address

Hey everybody,

Good news. I need you to change your address books again. Sorry about that. New cell phone. New email. Damn spam.

I’ve attached the details.

Au Revoir~

Hey! Wait!

What?

I said, wait a second.

But…

I just wondered what made you think that you could just decide to change?

Look this is an email message. Or a posting. You can’t really ask questions.

Or I could say: this is a relationship or a name. You can’t really just decide to change the terms. The contract. The expectations.

Contract?

Names are contracts. When I was a kid everybody always knew me by the short form of my name. I was cute. That version of the name was cute, but I was starting to tire of it or aspire toward the REAL name, the longer version long before I graduated high school.

Riiight….?

So I decided to change it when I went to college.

See? People do change their names.

Wrong. People still knew me from home. They undermined me. They got to all the key people first somehow. I don’t know how they managed it, but somehow it didn’t matter how many times I corrected them, reframed, introduced myself. Always the boyhood name.

But we don’t call you that now. We call you the “real” name.

You do, but its only a matter of time. You’ll meet someone. Hear a few stories. Slip up in front of me. Start to merge my identity with someone else who has the same name, only kept the boyhood version.

Look. I was just sending out a notice that I changed my email address and my cell number.

And I’m just saying that don’t you think we should have some say in that?

Changing my email or cell?

Well who beckons you with these magical incantations?

Hunh?

Telephone numbers and email addresses are ways of summoning you by way of a magic code. If we know the magical combination of numbers and letters – PRESTO! You can appear to us. No matter where you were, what you were doing. SUDDENLY you’re here with us.

Okay. So shouldn’t I get to decide HOW you beckon me? Since this magic…code (?) has so much power…?

Since when has anyone ever chosen their own name?






Since when do we get to choose how people refer to us?

Ummm. I guess since email? I don’t know, though. It seems like we get to choose what clothes we wear. What houses we live in. What schools we go to.

Really?!
Maybe cell phones are the beginning of real agency then. True freedom. Where we know our own true name, we decide who should have access to it and we re-create ourselves and our worlds accordingly. We can be islands who build bridges only to the other islands that we like…

That’s my point…these technologies are covering their tracks as they carry us into a desert. We’ll wake up in the middle of desolation and have no idea how we got there. And I just didn’t want you to send out an email and post a cell phone number that made it look like you had CHOSEN – all of your own accord – to go to some new theoretical place. When these choices are really making us over. All of us.

Yeah.

So anyway. I’ll call you sometime after my free minutes at nine.

Or text me. No cost…

Au Revoir.