For some reason, I  have an image in stuck in my head. It’s the 13th century – maybe the 14th – and in a cold, austere monastery, a monk is sitting at a desk, his dark brown robes gathered around him, writing by the light of three or four candles.

He has learned to write recently, having only fully caught the knack of it a couple of months ago. Reaching the end of a scroll, he sits back, neatly and carefully rolls up his sleeves, and takes a moment to look at all the words scattered across the desk. It then occurs to him, suddenly, that when he gets up and walks away, his words will still be there.

It must have been strange for our imaginary monk who, perhaps for the first time, sat witness to the multiple iterations of his self spread out over the rough, worn wood. For his whole life, he had been one person at a time, his memories of himself locked in his head. He could speak; he could tell others. But speech was so fleeting, so performative. And what if no-one was there to listen?

This was one of the things writing as a technology did. It allowed language to exist beyond the self, to operate independently of the person who put the words on the paper. And I imagine it was a strange thing to find oneself in words for the first time – to see the self that you both were and are, laid out in the same space, lying next to one another. Time must have taken on a new meaning. Perhaps space too.

So what happens when the page one writes upon stretches further past some limits of both space and time? What happens when the page is no longer a physical, immanent thing, but a flickering screen, simultaneously accessible by millions. What happens when the page we write upon is a canvas for half the world?

I guess what got me thinking about this was a lovely, melancholy column in the Globe by my latest Twitter crush, Lisa Jutras. In it, Jutras weaves a moody narrative about how the social web has led us to become “wispier version of ourselves”:

As if aware of this, we constantly seem to need reassurance about what kind of person we are. It’s no accident that Facebook quizzes – telling us what colour we are, what character from Mad Men, etc. – proliferate, even though they aren’t telling us anything we didn’t already know. We seem to need the computer to tell us that we exist.

Never was this more evident than when Google Streetview launched: Suddenly my Facebook newsfeed was glutted with photos of people’s own houses. Never mind that they could have taken a photo of their house and posted it the previous day. No, it was as if now, somehow, their house existed in a way it never did before. It seems we suffer from a kind of Stockholm syndrome: The computer dilutes our essence, but we continually look to the screen for proof of our own depth.

But, as much as I loved the column, to me, there is a difference between posting a photo of your house and finding it on Google Streetview. The former is an attempt to make yourself exist on the public page, to present yourself to the world and yourself. The latter is like finding public evidence of your own existence already there. When it shows up on something like Streetview, your house does exist in a way in never did before. It has stretched past the limits of your own life and become part of the public world.

For a couple of years now, this has been one my main concerns on this blog – that the web presents a ubiquitous public page that is a space for us to represent ourselves to ourselves. The public nature of the web is an extension of the fundamentally social nature of being, of the fact that we are simultaneously locked in our own minds, while those same minds are only human because of all the things that came from outside it: language, culture, belief etc.

On the web, I exist publicly in a way I never could have before. I like something about that – that someone who otherwise blends into the background, or becomes invisible in a group of people – can inscribe himself onto an open page for others to read. Maybe in doing so, I am becoming wispier. But then, I have always been wispy. Something about finding myself online makes me feel as if I exist more solidly, outside the cacophony of my own mind or the fleeting connections I call friendships.

Perhaps it’s my typical hyperbole, but I like to think of people who write on the web as new versions of that monk, suddenly struck by the fact that the page and its markings have done things to their self and their sense of it. And I dunno’, something about that fills me with hope. Perhaps it isn’t that the web has frayed the threads of the social; maybe it’s that it has projected the entire mess onto a screen we can all see. And for all the disconnection that has engendered, by taking the social and putting it somewhere, perhaps it will also help us confirm that we exist to others and ourselves.

Note: I’m actually pretty sure that most 13th century monks wouldn’t be doing anything so narcissistic as writing their own thoughts down on paper. But let’s just say our monk is a rule-breaker.