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RE: Taking broadband for granted
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srshea
Posts: 833
Joined: Oct. 29 2006
From: Olympia, WA in the Great Pacific Northwest
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 RE: Taking broadband for granted (in reply to Ron.M)
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Couple hours ago I turned the ol’ computer on and saw an email from an old friend I haven’t seen or spoken to in more than five years, informing me of a radio show he had just started doing and that would be streaming live today. I managed to catch the last hour or so. I got to send in my requests via email, got to hear his responses to me live on the air, got to hear the Bob Dylan song he picked for me, got to listen to a voice I haven’t heard in a long time. All this while I’m sitting here on the couch, a ten minute walk away from the waters of the Pacific ocean, and he’s sitting in an air studio in some little, middle of nowhere town in Vermont, three thousand miles away…
I like technological progress. I like the sort of connections that it can help make, like in the above anecdote. I like the convenience of a cell phone. I like that they’ve got a little fiber-optic camera they can ram up my ass to make sure I don’t have bowel cancer. But I also really appreciate being able to opt of using all the techno whim-whams and gee-gaws that are becoming increasingly ubiquitous in our world. While I appreciate the value of these things I don’t really actually LIKE using and interacting with a lot of this stuff. I spend a lot of time in front of the computer at work, and I find it to be really enervating. If I sit too long staring at a monitor without a break I feel fully drained of any energy or life. Sometimes the TV (which I really like having) will be on and the pointless, sucking inanity of it all will hit me. I’ll get up and turn it off and feel instantly better.
I live in close proximity to a lot of beautiful natural surroundings that I’m very fortunate to have access to. I don’t have to go far to get out in the woods and “get away from it all”. I don’t actual do it as much as I would like to, but when I do, man, I can really feel it. Feels good.
This is, in a small way, one of the things that appeals to me about playing flamenco guitar. It feels a little earthy, a little olde timey. Even though I spend a lot of time playing in front of the laptop with some video or with a quartz metronome clicking away at me, at base the experience is that of holding a piece of wood in my hands, something that vibrates and resonates in a natural way, something tactile that feels good. Even if my playing’s bad, the physical sensation of it can still be pleasurable if I take the time to appreciate it.
Pretty soon I’ll be turning the computer off to go read a book. Again, one of the things I like about reading is the tactile sensation of holding a book, slowly turning the pages. I like being surrounded by books, like casually wandering through used bookstores. I like sorting through my own books, picking out stuff that hasn’t been read yet, seeing something that I might like to read again soon, leisurely flipping through things. My boss is a big tech fan, an early adopter of just about every new electronic gizmo you can think of. He’s always going on about the imminent death of print and how we’ll all be doing all our reading off our gizmos soon and how great that is. When he gets going on this track I just nod my head dutifully and let him go. Even if all the bookstores ran dry tomorrow, I’ve still got enough books, shelves of ‘em, to last me till my final days. And when the techo-apocalypse comes and civilization is wiped out I will be very, very careful NOT to break my glasses like Burgess Meredith in that soul crushing episode of the Twilight Zone…..
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Date Feb. 13 2010 14:49:48
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