I’ve been noticing more and more the keen divide between my life led online and my life led in meatspace, and am getting interested in ways to close the gap, especially in public.

I had some laptop stickers printed saying “Hello there. Yes you. Just because I’m using a laptop at this table, that doesn’t mean you can’t sit here too.”

One of my friends owns a tea room with free wifi, and occasionally you can go in and find a sea of tables, each occupied by one person with a laptop. This of course follows from some very natural human behaviour: people tend to distribute themselves evenly in public spaces such as buses, cafes, and urinals.

However, I find when a screen is sucking me in, it generally doesn’t matter if there’s a stranger next to or opposite me. I might as well share the table if I’m not waiting for someone in particular.

I find I’ve been spending less time on the internet recently; I get fed up of only seeing the world around the bezel of a macbook, and in two weeks off work over Christmas I hardly touched it. I’ve also been a lot more conscious that the time I spend online should create value, as Merlin Mann writes about at length here. I want my time spent on the internet to be better than just entertaining, I want the things I create to be my best, and I want my online life to be enmeshed with my real life rather than a separate existence, an escape, or a distraction from anything.

I also put various social networks and services along with my usernames on the back of the laptop, using a dymo embosser. I left the more intimate ones off because it kind of repulses me when people I hardly know and will probably never see again add me there (I was guilty of this, until I understood that doing it was fundamentally creating noise for others. Collecting mechanics can really be insidious). Like the custom sticker, I don’t really expect these to have much effect on anything, but I still like to have them there. I also think it looks better than the usual sticker encrusted mess people make of laptop lids, and it’s an attempt to do something more explicitly functional as well as aesthetic with the idea.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 22nd, 2009 at 23:07 and is filed under Privacy, Psychology, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.