the world is (not!) flat.
I only recently learned about idego. Through that site, I discovered that I am among the first .54% to adopt Twitter. Yes, you read that correctly: of all the folks who’ve got a Twitter account, I am in the quickest 99th percentile. (No, not THIS Twitter, silly. My original [NSFW] Twitter.) I’d venture to guess I land in the top Medium adopters, also.
I had Gmail in 2004, LinkedIn in 2005, and a Facebook account as soon as you no longer had to have a valid college ID to get one. It’s not my job to be an early adopter, and it’s not even truly MY hobby. It’s generally my brother who introduces me to new platforms, but he’s currently got his hands full of first year law school.
I quit Facebook because worlds started colliding in an uncomfortable way. Not that I have anything to hide, per se, but—do my coworkers really need to see pictures of me at summer camp with my niece, sporting our July 4th getups? Yeah, I don’t think so. Sure, you can adjust the knobs and control the flows, but Facebook is like that high-maintenance high school cheerleader BFF—too demanding, and too ready to gossip.
On the other hand, email isn’t demanding at all. No, really. Synchronous communication has always been difficult for me. I am one of the USPS remaining few supporters and a fan of email from way back. I pushed for PROFS implementation when my coworkers were still schlepping around paper memos. I had a CompuServe email address—you know, the series of numbers with a comma? 71004,316. AOL, Yahoo!, hotmail, mail.com, Bellsouth, Gmail - I’ve tried them all. Digital mail is a miracle. We communicate outside the boundaries of geography and time, and never give it a thought.
Speaking of time…
Digital timepieces have distilled the richness of life’s many moments to 28 binarily-lit line segments. “A quarter to” and “half past” are replaced by “:43" and “:31". Who the hell really cares if it’s 8:56 or 8:57? Watching our lives tick away minute by tightly quantified minute is making us all antsy and dissatisfied. Days used to be measured in just that: days. We’ve narrowed our focus to increments of time so tiny as to be impossible to fill with anything but angst. Thanks but I will keep the anthropomorphized clock face, with hands sweeping gently through the days.
Speaking of days…
Digital calendars have earned their place. My Google “birthdays and anniversaries” calendar sends me an email three days before my step-sister’s daughter’s birthday. Plenty of time to find a suitably generic yet gloriously glitterfied paper card, ink my sincerest sentiments within, locate and include a crisp analog $10, then seal, address, stamp, and send. On the business side, Outlook has transformed scheduling a meeting. Gone are the days of calling a dozen people to coordinate. And, calling them back. And, back again… And, again…
On the other hand, when the going gets tough and multiple projects are impinging on my preciously quantified time, I inevitably pull out a paper calendar and fill in the boxes with commitments, deadlines, appointments, and plans. On paper, in the boxes, I can SEE time, see the allotments, understand the placement of events relative to each other. On paper, time regains its dimension—because life isn’t an appointment, it’s a journey.
Speaking of journeys…
A book is a journey. Fiction, non-fiction, doesn’t matter—a book is always a journey. You start at the beginning, move through, end at the end. Boom. Journey.
I have only just made the transition to bytten-books, having received a nook from The Winter Solstice Gifting Faerie. I enjoy having a library at my fingertips—more books than I could possibly fit in my painfully pretentious Eddie Bauer messenger bag, and yet… with digital books there’s a loss of geography. Knowing I am on page 256/352 doesn’t quite replace seeing my bookmark sticking out, three-quarters the way through a book three and a half inches thick. I am this many inches IN with this many inches TO GO.
The analog book provides visual evidence of where I am in my journey. As does the analog calendar. As does the analog watch. As does the analog world. Length and width and height. Dimension.
The digital world is flat. I am stiletto.
