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Lately I have either signs of dimentia or confusion from the dizzying changes in technicalia. Seems every day there is some new online social club you can join-Plaxo, Facebook, Twitter, et al. Twitter lets you put in 140 characters as a message to an expanding list of "followers" you generate to read that brief concept. And reading them is like trying to decipher a foreign tongue. But there are many interesting things to chase down and surf from those little snippets of data--they refer you to exotic or previously unknown sites full of intereseting data that may or maYy not have practical purpose. I find myself wasting time. However, ifyou have half million followers, as some actually have, you can promote something to that group reading your little pieces of data, and my friend Laura Sherman who has "Your Chess Coach", teaching kids and adults to play (she is a master herself) has reached and developed a chess public through Twitter. It has practical uses. But how do you keep up? Talking to a buddy yesterday in the Qual section of the Flag AO, who queried why kids go around texting, buried in their cell phones. I ventured that they were wanting to be acknowledged, wanting to be assured that they exist in this rapidly moving world where people are piling up one on top of the other and individuality is dying in a grossly accelerated homogenization of the species. They are crying out to be acknowledged for themselves and not being able to "be" they are "doing." Inasmuch as the elements of life are "be" "do" and "have"they can't achieve the be. You have to decide what to be so you can be that and then do the things that that beingness is so you then can have the things that the beingness wants and achieves through doingness to get it. But to do that, you have to back in, learning what you want to Have first, to find what you need to do to be that. So these kids are craving beingness, but seem to be sucked up in a technical spiral like my character in my novel Nimrod's Peril---the N'aa'maan, who lives for information, data, thinking of it is food, rather than developing spiritually he just gets more data, not knowing that knowledge is not data, but certainty. Seeking certainty, these kids are texting texting texting. Doing, doing doing.
Very valid viewpoint, but what I think it is remarkable about nowadays technology is that it allows for people to be in comm. And that is an incredibly important pluspoint. So much so that in my opinion supercedes any outness regarding how it is carried out. Plus the power inherent in the speed of texting is something to behold. When stripped down to basics, there is no difference between a communication cycle carried out by normal mail, by e-mail, or by text messaging - except the speed with which occurs. Funny, I belong to the Obama age bracket and I have adopted things like texting that is much more common with younger people. A friend of mine would make fun of me because he would find me texting sometimes, and make fun of me saying that behaviour belonged to 16 year girls. My cell phone however can also handle emails and it was funny how if I'd say I was actually answering an email, not texting, he would shut up and give me a blank stare, for he had nothing to say. E-mail was a speed of particle flow he could handle and understand, but texting would be beyond his ability to handle randomity and thus, not understanding it, he would choose to make fun of it. I, in turn, find that funny.
ReplyDeleteGreat comments both! For my part, email is the way to go because I am a very fast touch typist and can't STAND the thought of sitting there with my thumbs awkwardly doing the typing, having to watch every character I type! If someone made a tiny keyboard that a touch typist could use rapidly, then I might get into doing email from a cellphone.
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