Allison M. Shapira

Sunday, October 21, 2007

Interconnected Craziness

Some moments beg to be recorded in some way - you're going about your daily life and, all of a sudden, you look at your situation not from down on the dance floor but from up on the balcony, to use an expression from Professor Ron Heifetz of Harvard University. You take a step back from your routine to acknowledge the larger trends that are developing around you.

I'm sitting at home on a Sunday afternoon. My husband is speaking with his cousin in Israel, calling from a basic American cell phone to an Israeli land line. In another room, my father-in-law is using his Palm Treo to conduct business with an Israeli hospital in Jerusalem. Meanwhile, I'm running back and forth between my desktop and laptop computers, using a flash drive to transfer a file from one to another because the laptop's Internet connection is stronger and I didn't save the desktop's files onto our network. My iPhone is resting on top of the textbook Communication Technology Update.

A third computer, the slowest in the house, is sitting unused in the office, ironically right next to the wireless router.

This is the multimedia home that has been created around us. Rather, this is the multimedia home that we have created for ourselves. It is both more complex and more user-friendly than ever before. It allows us to be in more places at the same time than ever before.

It also means that three people are in the same house and don't interact with each other all. But we could if we wanted to, and that element of disconnect by choice, with the option of instantly reconnecting at will, is a key factor in our lives. Technology is moving at a lightning pace around us, and we can pick and choose when and where to harness it, and when to let it go right past us.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home