A Tribute to Superlocal

by Softwarily

On my other blog I just wrote a small tribute to a person that died who I didn't know but his death affected me a lot. He went by the handle "superlocal." He was a photographer that took great pop-culture photographs. I loved going to his blog to look at his photos. It really brightened my day due to his aspect of the world and his subtle sense of humour. I was able to get in touch with him briefly through twitter before his account got suspended (he was listed as a spammer though I never saw any spam come from his account). I found him to be very personable and friendly person.

As I mentioned above, he died. When he died the people who run the site that he was a guest blogger on put up a tribute to him. This is the first time that I found out what his real name was and could research him more.

This got me thinking about how we interact in a virtual world. This really is not a big deal to me. I have had virtual friends since I was in high school. Most of them I have never met, even though in some cases we only lived a few miles from each other. One of the things that I was thinking about was about how I basically have two lists of virtual friends:

1. Friends that I want to meet in person.
2. Friends that, even though they are a good friend, I really never want to meet them in person.

Emil Goh, or superlocal, was one of the people that made the first list. I have no idea of why. I guess it's just that from his photos he seemed like a really nice person. Someone that you would like to hang out with and eat some really good looking street food.

I know that the chances of me actually meeting him (when he was alive) were slim to none, However when I saw he died it felt strange to me for a few reasons:

1. I was sad to see such a nice person die at such a young age (43).
2. I felt like what he contributed was valuable and now that will be gone.
3. I'll never get to meet him.

I find this virtual world that we've come to live in is a strange world. The virtual means of communication and getting to know people certainly makes this world a much smaller world.

Strangely at the same time it makes the world larger than ever. Even though I have the opportunity to see all of this cool stuff that is happening on the other side of the world, I know it is the other side of the world. At this point in my life the probability of me going to see the other side of the world is slim. This makes me feel that the world is much, much bigger than it was when I knew nothing about the interesting things I could see and experience there.