The Note

T h e  N o t e

I have always liked gadgets and technology. I was a fairly early adopter of personal computers. The first one I owned was in 1981 or 1982. It was manufactured by Tandy Corporation (Radio Shack) and was branded the Color Computer. It had no monitor. The user hooked it to a TV set. It had no hard drive. It didn't even have a floppy drive. (Remember those?) Input and output were accomplished via a cassette recorder. (Don't even ask about the printers that were available then.) My recollection is that the computer came shipped with 16 KB of RAM. Not GB. Not MB. KB. I opened it up, put in chips to bring up to 32 KB and for about 2 weeks I was the hottest jock on the block.

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Then came a parade of various computers over the years and now, on a given day, if you walk up to me, I may have two smart phones on me (one personal and one for work.) I may have an iPad under my arm. If my backpack is nearby, my Kindle is in there. I have two computers at work, three at home. I am writing this "The Note" away from my home (and office) on an iPad connected to a bluetooth keyboard. You know the story.

I have had websites up for many years. One's a website offering advice to parents on coping as the parent of a teenage driver. I founded an online community of Irish traditional musicians which is another nutty story. And, of course, I spend a good bit of time in the world of online literary magazines.

I have been experimenting with print publishing recently and what print publishing really makes me want to do is more online publishing.

So, all that said, I've been thinking of comic Louis C.K.'s riff on personal technology and our collective moods. "Everything's awesome," he says, "and no one is happy." Although I can't quite defend this on the facts, I often feel that the more connected we are, the more disconnected we are. The more means we have to communicate, the less we actually communicate. Does social media make us more social or less social? Not sure. I would count as among my best friends a man who I've never met in person and with whom I've never shared a telephone call. But, I don't know my neighbors. There's an elderly couple who have lived across the street from us for 21 years. We don't know their names.

And then there are the problems associated with younger and younger children being given more and more sophisticated cell phones and other devices even though, as a culture, we haven't begun to consider the implications of that. It's fire, ready, aim.

The rapid change in technology has me thinking, sometimes, about a question often posed by the performance artist Laurie Anderson. "What I want to know is," she says, "are things getting better or are they getting worse?" 

Ok. I'm just rambling. But it's iRambling.

Here's Right Hand Pointing #56, coming to you via the behavior of a massive wad of 1's and 0's. As usual, my thanks to all who contributed, all who submitted, my co-editors and staff of readers, and to you for your patronage.

Best,

Dale