For a couple more weeks I’m without a personal laptop or desk computer, having returned the former to MFPOW and having left the other 3,000 miles away in boxes carefully labeled OPEN FIRST. I am also without TV. Sandy and the cats will join me in a couple of months. So my evenings are spent reading and listening to the radio.
From my temporary digs, I am able to walk 4to my office and use its PC whenever I want to, and I do have this iPhone, which I am laboriously writing on right now, using the WordPress app. So I am only underconnected by choice. Plus I do have a spiffy new clock radio where I can dock my iPhone and listen to NPR live or via a thousand streams.
Still, my Pioneer Days have some interesting ramifications.
On the one hand, I am appreciating the quiet evenings where I read through contracts, standards, and historical paperwork. There’s a lot of ground to cover, and poring over fine print is easier without the lure of the web or TV.
My pleasure reading feels more attuned. I’m not tempted to put down a book or magazine to watch Cold Case or ramble around the social networks. What I start reading, I finish.
On the other hand, I miss writing. I had planned to take a writing moratorium, but now that I am in that place, all I want to do is write. That may not be a bad thing, to have turned writing into a tempoarily unattainable object of affection.
I also am a bit out of touch on the social nets. Stephen Abram wrote what about open source? Michael Porter and David Lee King did a Library 101 video? People want me to upload my slides from my talk in Iowa? All in good time, friends.
Meanwhile, the Twitter and Facebook updates tick past, somewhere out there on the web, while I sit at a kitchen table, turning the pages of old contracts while the radio murmurs.
Posted on this day, other years:
- Powder: The YouTube Trailer - 2008
- Email lists: are they last-century? - 2007
- Defrag 2007: Exploring the Implicit - 2007
- The Unmentionable Tallahassee Issue Gets Mentioned - 2006
- FRL Among the Digirati - 2005
- LiB Covers Gorman at CLA - 2005
- Such Long Legs I Have... - 2005
- A Dissident and a Magazine - 2004
- lii.org Toolbar - 2003
- RSS Woes - 2003
Interesting post! I’ve thought quite a bit recently about how the Internet has changed my attention span. Not in a good way, I fear.
Good luck with the paperwork review, and with your new job.
Hi,
That’s very nice post. I wish I could have written anything like this. Good Luck for your job