Seems to me that we’re all in a rush – that there’s pressure for us to keep up with the troops, yes, as if we’re soldiers in an army. We might miss out, we might get left behind, caught in an ambush, miss the boat, the bus, whatever.
Now, I love computers, don’t get me wrong. Or at least, what they are able to do, and how we can utilize them. But I want to (need to) do so slowly. Methodically. With a sense of control, discrimination, finesse, determination.
Know what I mean?
Instead, I get the feeling that we’re being driven to march to another or others’ tune(s). The WWW or ‘Thrubs’, a moniker that leaped into my brain from the ether just this very minute, my term for the electronic milieu we’re having to sink or swim in to survive, seems to me to be under the control of hyper-people. Frenetic types. Scattered attention and A.D.D sufferers.
Let me put it this way: I wish to keeps tabs on myself and on my activities. From time to time, I need to start afresh, when I’ll look over my personal operating systems and return to ground zero. And the thing is, Thrubs doesn’t easily allow me to do that.
In order to reinvent my own wheel I would need to backtrack and re-tweak how I keep blogs, maintain email lists, search the web, bookmark and link and communicate etc etc as well as erasing stuff and systems I have come to think of as inferior. This is all terribly time-consuming, ineffective and inefficient.
What goes against my grain is having to go about the business not by refining, but by adding patches, as it were, to what has previously been put in place, exactly how computer boffins conglomerate their software. It’s a matter of running before one can perfectly walk. Or, to be more precise (as Thomson - or was it Thompson? - would say) it’s as if we’re sitting on a unicycle, letting ourselves fall forward, pedalling to catch up, and then repeating ad infinitum that process.
Does it have to be that way? Is this the nature of the electronic beast? If so, the magic and the gimmickry will eventually outpace us. More and more of us (people like me) are going to become alienated, notwithstanding the marvellous opportunities and possibilities that the candy shelf offers.
It’s Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. If not right now, then soon.
