Dreamwidth and Yearning for Humanity on the Web

Have you heard of sonder? It's a neological emotion I find myself feeling often. Watching an elderly man on the LRT mouthing to himself by the window; scrolling past a comment thread in a language I can't read; standing on Centre Street at dusk while the city hums with the ten thousand private emergencies of strangers. What are the million people in my own city doing, right now, this instant? Let alone the over eight billion across more than 190 countries. I could write entire posts dedicated to Tajikistan, or Guinea-Bissau, or Tuvalu, or Comoros. Worlds I will never brush against. There is so much I don't know, and so much more that I don't know that I don't know. Two of my favourite documentaries are Life in a Day (2010) and Life in a Day (2020), both crowd-sourced films assembled from roughly 80,000 clips submitted to YouTube. One single ordinary day filmed by people on every continent. I find watching these medicine for sonder, though even they still show such a thin splinter of…