“Cyberspace is a funhouse mirror of our own society.”
Bruce Sterling
During the previous century (late 1990s), when I told a friend I was moving to Meeker she flinched. She’d recently been on a cross-country flight and her seatmate turned out to be from Meeker. They’d told her the town wasn’t welcoming, friendly, or a good place for newcomers. Several years later, a Glenwood dentist reviewed my chart while we waited for the novocaine to take effect. “Meeker, eh?” he asked. I mumbled something around a rapidly numbing mouth, which he construed as an invitation for opinion sharing. “Heard that’s a really clique-ish place.”
Over the years, I’ve had a handful of messages come my way from people who’ve changed their minds about coming here to visit or moving here for a job because when they peeked behind the social media curtain in their research and uncovered many of the same negative behaviors and attitudes that dentist and the stranger on the plane shared. I know that stuff happens everywhere, it’s just disappointing to find out your imagined dream destination is just as flawed as wherever you’re trying to escape from, albeit in different ways.
The internet, and particularly social media, have ripped away the insulation of distance and time that once muffled our internal community squabbles, decades-old feuds and petty contretemps from the outside world. Now, if you want to find out about a place, it only takes a few keystrokes to get an in-your-face view of how the small-town sausage is made.
Does it matter? Maybe, maybe not. Those who like what they see will be drawn in, bringing more of the same attitudes and behaviors with them, and those who aren’t impressed will stay away. We’re either planting flowers that attract honeybees, or creating heaps of manure that attract flies.
By NIKI TURNER
