My Precipice

“The great thing in the world is not so much where we stand, as in what direction we are moving.” Oliver Wendell Holmes

I feeling like I'm standing on a precipice: behind me are books, libraries, cards and letters, and I am falling into the abyss created by the World Wide Web, a world that contains e-mail, social networking, my Crackberry, blogging, podcasting, and a whole bunch of other stuff techies thought up but remain somewhere outside my awareness.

I used to go to the library. I used to read a lot. Now--not so much, and when I do, I'm apt to check out a book of short stories, or worse, leaf through a magazine. I am a magazine junkie. I need serious magazine rehab. It's ridiculous the amount of money I spend on magazines. Not too long ago, I started to wonder how I morphed from this little bookworm, reading her dad's science fiction to the magazine thumber I am today. I came to the conclusion that my attention span, my focus, began to decrease when I turned sixteen, the year MTV came to Upper Michigan.

Yes, it's all MTV's fault, or it would be if I chose to look at it in a negative way. But I'm getting to a point in my life where I try to judge very little, except when I watch American Idol or if someone asks me about sea urchins--those things are nasty. It's not good or bad--it's just the way it is. C'est la vie. Music videos changed me in the way I visualize and absorb the world around me.

Music, TV, and film seem faster; knowledge gets distributed in shorter increments. And faster and shorter, and faster and shorter as the years go by. From my childhood through college, when I was directed to learn something, I went to the library or looked it up in the encyclopedia, and turned in a hand-written report (though I will brag and tell you that I taught myself how to type on a manual typewriter when I was 11. There's not a lot to do in Upper Michigan in the wintertime). Today I'll look something up on a search engine--oh, who am I kidding?--on Google, and, if the subject warrants, will follow up with search on You Tube. But even that method is slowly evolving for me: I've thrown a question out on Twitter and one of its cousins, Tweetworks, and got great answers. I actually got an idea for a baby shower gift thanks to tweeting. Now information gathering can be personal and global at the same time.

I maintain a healthy curiosity in all of the Web 2.0 tools. But I know some of my millions of readers are thinking, "what the heck is Tweetworks and why should I care?" The answer to that lies in another blog, written by someone who is not me. Start with the Geek Girls--they post great perspectives on social media and the like. I am only at the "instincts tell me this is a good thing" stage. Even so, I also understand that life happens outside the realm of my computer. Sometimes I need to walk away from the keyboard, put my Crackberry on silent and stroll to the library, or better yet, wander aimlessly outside.

Pause to reminisce about pic at the right, taken last year at Seven Seas Beach in Puerto Rico...

Oh, geez--where is this darn missive going? I promise future posts will have a point. For now, I look back at libraries and manual typewriters; I look forward, past blogging and Facebook and see many possibilities.