I have a routine when I first get to work each morning. It starts with entering the office quietly, turning on the harsh fluorescent lights (ouch), and looking for the red light on my office phone that indicates voice mails awaiting (this usually involves some silent prayers that the red light is either dim or that the voices on the other end are just calling to tell me to have a great day instead of asking for things I can't do at the moment). I check my work email, my personal email, my facebook (because some people don't use real email anymore - the horror), and sometimes twitter. Then I usually jot down a list of things I need to accomplish, or I add to the list that I started yesterday or a week ago and haven't yet finished. I emerge about 30 minutes later ready to say actual words to my co-workers and face the working world for the day. And if that fails, I fake it. :)
Today, I checked twitter. And I saw someone's tweet with a link to a tumblr account. I saw a tweet to a loopt (?) account. I saw a tweet that was the exact replica of a facebook status. And for a moment, I thought, "Maybe it would be fun to have a tumblr [despite my obvious issues with the intentional misspelling]." Or maybe it would be festive to link all of my life together so that at once touch of a button, you (all two-ish of you who read this) will know where I am, what I'm doing, and what I'm thinking all at the same time. But frankly, that's just scary as hell to me. I actually miss the days before I had a cell phone... Gasp! Yes, I remember that time. It was called high school. And somehow we made it out okay and turned into mostly decent people. It was nice to have the home phone ring and just choose not to answer it if you were busy. Now that everyone has caller ID, you can't reject a call or ignore it because everyone will assume that it's because you didn't want to talk to them specifically. And while I appreciate the ease of texting, there are times when, really, couldn't we have just had this conversation using our voices? My home computer, an Apple iBook G4, was like the coolest thing in the world 5 years ago. And now, despite no obvious flaws in general performance and no indication that it plans to die anytime soon, its technology is almost completely obsolete, to the point where certain technologies on ye olde interweb simply refuse to function with it. But if my computer won't do something for me, my phone almost always will. I can even read books, whole entire books, on it.
This all feels a little Fahrenheit 451 to me, and it seems like a little bit of insanity. We are so connected, and yet it feels like I don't really know what's going on in anyone's life. Sure, I see the tweets, the photos they've uploaded to facebook, and maybe even a random thought or two if they have a blog. But how real can it be when when it's all through a computer? I mean, if you take a real emotion, type it into a machine, let it compute and pixelate around before displaying out to your own digital world, how real is it - really - by the time it reaches your intended audience? Seems to me like it works the same way as making a copy of a copy - slowly distorting and watering down until it is only a faded version of itself in the end. Sometimes that's a good thing... I'm personally pretty glad I don't have to be there in person for a lot of the ridiculous rants I read on facebook. But sometimes I wish I could hear the excitement in someone's voice or see them shed a happy tear when they tell me they're finally graduating from college or expecting their first child, instead of just reading a lot of exclamation points at the end of a tweet and assuming they mean what I think they mean. I really hope we aren't just creating watered down digital versions of ourselves and evolving into beings incapable of functioning on a real human level, face to face.
I realize a lot of these thoughts are hypocritical, as I write this blog from my computer and share it with you on the internet, via a link from my twitter account. (I could write it from my phone if I really wanted.) I say all of this not to proclaim a personal stance against technology or as a call to return to archaic practices. We do have to live in the world as it exists, after all. There are times when it is easier to observe life from afar, but how much do you really feel and experience - and therefore, how much do you really learn - from those things if you don't literally touch the hurt and pain and joy and exhilaration of those moments? I'm not sure I know the meaning of life... but I am almost positive that point of it all isn't to have the latest and best technology and to "learn" without truly understanding. I say this simply to remind myself not to get so caught up in the digital display of the lives of those around me that I forget to participate in the real flesh and bone moments.
