iReality

Wow, it is March. March. Is that possible? Apparently. I am impressed by how time has flown, and put it down to an incredible flurry of activity for me.

I went back, after a hiatus of feeling lazy, to putting together a structure for my novel. I'm also brainstorming with the proprietor of Falkora Jewelry, on some fun social media campaigns to increase her network. She does great sales when she goes to shows and conventions, but as we all know, 140 character virtual tweets are now how we communicatively define our lives.

Seriously, though, I've been having a real love-hate relationship with technology lately. I recently read an article about AT&T and Verizon's predictions that within the next couple of years, we will have serious spectrum issues trying to handle the volume of data being volleyed through the ether by smartphone users. P.S., trying to find that article again to repost it here, I had to wade through about 3,000,000,000 articles about the iPad 3 or 4 or 8 or whatever. Another tangent.

I really hate how slow my android Motorola Citrus is most of the time. We pay for an unlimited data plan, but half the time I feel like I could walk to Google's headquarters in California before their homepage finishes loading on my tiny touchscreen, which is covered in my tiny-hand fingerprints. I also hate myself for caring about something so trivial. What do I really do on my smartphone that's that worthwhile?

I want to be disconnected from this crippling need to constantly be connected, and yet it is supposedly critical to social and economic survival in this world. Isn't it? I don't know.

I would like to be a writer, and a marketer, who makes peace with the monsters of technology. But is it possible to compete in a world of communication, without being constantly in communication?

tribute to past loves in technology

em called me yesterday to ask if it was ok for our little sister to inherit our old imac, which i primarily used throughout high school and college. thinking about it after i got off the phone with her made me suddenly reminiscent of all the old technology i grew up with and loved. is that odd? sounds like it could be a weird ethnography into the life of a childhood in the late eighties/early nineties.

but truly, you could say that technology does become a part of your identity. this imac served me faithfully for 8 years:
i wrote novella after novella on it, played the various myst games that were so amazing, and created art projects of questionable skill in adobe photoshop.

and what about other past loves in the world of technology? here are some that i still think of fondly:

the original nintendo, of course. this must come first as one of the greatest inventions of the 1980's. nintendo was not the first video game system, but it was truly the best.i still value it above all other systems, even though to get mine working now, you have to shove another game in on top of the first to keep the one you're actually intending to play, in the machine:


and then there was lite-brite, which offered endless creative possibility:

and of course, the one item i always coveted as a child but never received: power wheels.
toys 'r us had a little mermaid-themed power wheels that was amazing, but which i can't find a google image of, which just shows how rare and precious these babies were.

mindful attention

a friend recently posted this article on facebook, concerning the limiting aspect of twitter for the newspaper world and the philosophy behind it:

"i worry that microblogging cheats my students out of their trump card: a mindful attention to the subject in front of them, so that they can capture its sights and sounds, its smells and tactile qualities, to share with readers. how can twittering stories from laptops and phones possibly replace the attentive journalist who tucks a digital recorder artfully under a notepad, pencil behind one ear, and gives full attention to the subject at hand?"

the author, a journalism professor, worries that twitter is come to be seen as the sole neccessary venue by which to convey information--that is, the newspaper article (online or otherwise), with its thoroughly investigated knowledge, is superfluous.

we've started playing with twitter in regards to admissions, but i question how much value it really has. i'm willing to go along for the ride and experiment with 'twittering,' say, application review, but to hear that so many people see the space of 140 characters as a replacement for a fuller--and consequently more accurate--account of the most important moments of human record, is kind of unsettling.

it also makes me wonder, am i joined in this feeling, or have i become too old for my generation? maybe i'm supposed to embrace twitter more. but i couldn't have told you all of this in the space of 140 characters.

communication across the ages

i've gotten back into writing in my paper journal again, as well as in this journal. i fell out of it for over a year, mostly from feeling that i hadn't anything to say which couldn't be shared with the whole world, if i cared to...but now it is useful to have somewhere to put my private thoughts once again. not that they are so very private, mind you, but, well–you know, half the things you say in your head wouldn't be of interest to the general public, and i probably spend too much text already on writing things here that are of interest to no one save myself. but that's a topic on which i've already meditated, and the truth is that i like having both digital and paper options available to me.

for one thing, the ease of typing allows my thoughts to flow quickly without losing them while i write. writing by hand takes a little bit more of a process–and yet i do find that i write more creatively sometimes by hand. this is an interesting phenomenon that has been noted both, i believe, in scientific study as well as by the average layperson. i remember reading an article in the atlantic last summer (while i was in the library up in salisbury, ct, while at mt. riga, incidentally) where friedrich nietzche's friends noticed that, upon switching from pen and paper to typewriter, his prose had become terser than ever. 'our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.' isn't that fascinating? what have we lost–or gained–then, by the switch from processing our thoughts with writing tool in one hand, to processing them with both sets of fingers touching keys?

that is why i prefer to maintain both, when i can. people should be made to reflect on their thoughts through both mediums, so that nothing is lost in translation, as it were.