Risto Linturi, research fellow of the Helsinki Telephone Corporation, quoted in Wired magazine, describes the extraordinary behaviour kids in the streets of Helsinki, all carrying cellphones with messaging capabilities. They are not exchanging important business information, they’re just chattering, staying in touch. "We are herd animals," he says. "These kids are connected to their herd – they always know where it’s moving." Pervasive wireless communication, he believes will "bring us back to behaviour patterns that were natural to us and destroy behaviour patterns that were brought about by the limitations of technology."

We are natural villagers. For most of mankind’s history we have lived in very small communities in which we knew everybody and everybody knew us. But gradually there grew to be far too many of us, and our communities became too large and disparate for us to be able to feel a part of them, and our technologies were unequal to the task of drawing us together. But that is changing.

How to Stop Worrying and Learn to Love the Internet - douglasadams.com

I read the quote above, from the inimitable Mr Adams, a few days back and was struck by the apparent simplicity of the idea it expressed. As I sit here in a darkened room flicking repeatedly back and forth between blog pages, forums, flickr, Twitter, Facebook and others, I am busy recreating connections somehow lost in the real world. Moving back and forth between Saudi and the UK, I now carry my social world with me, never again do I truly need to be apart from my 'friends'. No surprise then that the absence of some or other contact from the virtual world, leads to a sense of 'missing' them and wondering what they are up to. I feel more detached if I don't have internet access than I do when I'm away from friends and family.

I've no idea whether this has any basis in fact but, it seems to me, that those parts of the world that are the least likely to have an internet connection, are the most likely to live in villages, and vice versa. They strive to join the 'haves', whilst we strive to recreate a pastiche of the community we left, only constructed of bits and bytes. I'm sure the social anthropologists will have field day with this sort of stuff in years to come. In the meantime, I will keep trying to keep up with what's going on within my own personal mouse-driven sphere of interest for another evening.

For a long time now, I've always gone by the adage that one should use your mouth and ears in the proportion that they are provided. Generally speaking this seems to have served me well, I get to learn things, I don't purposely put my foot in it by saying the wrong thing, I don't have a love affair with the sound of my own voice. It does though have some disadvantages, people do perhaps think I'm too quiet and as a result, I have a sneaking suspicion that opportunities that should perhaps arise for me, arise for other people instead (I have also discovered that smoking does you no harm in the career stakes either, but that's a whole other issue).

In an idle moment this evening, I also wondered whether this principle translates into internet use also. To anyone who visits here regularly, it will be readily apparent that I don't post all that often on here - kind of odd when I could reasonably be described as something of an internet addict - I do though read avidly, but probably not as widely as I should. As I look around though there are plenty of people who, it would seem, cannot shut up (metaphorically speaking). It's not as if I can't write or understand the tools available, I just feel somehow inhibited by some inner working that says "keep your thoughts to yourself". It may be some form of self-protection mechanism, after all, there are rather a lot of people I know in both a work and social setting, who are perfectly well aware of this domain, who owns it and in a good few cases how I came to acquire it (nothing dodgy in that though). Given that blogging forms no natural adjunct to me making a living, what then do I write that allows me to express myself in a way that isn't in some way misinterpreted or viewed with suspicion?

The answer currently appears to be very little of any significance, save numerous references to my assorted hobbies, the occasional travelogue and generally inadequately informed comments on world affairs as and when my gaze is attracted to them. Whether anyone learns a great deal about the inner workings of 'Planet Me' in the process is likely to be purely coincidental and you may be wondering (and to misquote the late great Douglas Adams) "This Chris of Arabia... ...what is he, man or mouse? Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?"

Now I'm not likely to answer that question in its literal sense, but using a more general interpretation, then the answer is a very firm "yes". There is a place on Planet Me for the usual panoply of human emotion and experience that goes beyond what you will have divined so far, or at least from these pages. What makes me tick though, and what I should report here remains an open question. Let's for the moment say that there are sufficient matters orbiting 'Me' that would, I'm sure, make interesting reading to those who inhabit a different cultural enclave. Maybe one day, these will be something I will feel more readily disposed towards sharing.

For now then...

[EDIT] Fundamental flaw in the title and early part of this post corrected...