Tuesday, January 8, 2008

A Semi-Random Walk Through My Muddled Brain...

So, after nearly 4 years since my last post on deadjournal.com and a myriad of changes in my life and in the world of blogging, I’ve decided to start writing again… writing… now there’s a word to consider for my first posting. It seems to me a strange thing to describe what I/we do any more as writing, since so little of the composing of words into sentences, paragraphs, and larger forms actually takes place with the physical act of placing pen or pencil to paper. So much of what we do now occurs with computers and word processing programs, keyboards or voice recognition software, or even PDA’s and thumbpads, that to call it writing seem so… oh, I don’t know… perhaps “quaint” isn’t exactly the correct word, but something like that.

Yet, in many ways, though we compose pages upon pages of text on our laptops or other devices, stored in little mysterious 1’s and 0’s on some device we don’t understand, it doesn’t seem quite real in some way until we see it reduced to ink and paper. There is a comforting physicality to seeing our words printed out by pigmented chemicals onto a surface of dried, partially digested wood pulp that cannot be matched by any Sony e-book or 30 inch LCD monitor, no matter how safe or secure or redundant that hardened, fireproof 4-disk RAID drive array is. And it is not just in terms of paper and pixels… this divergence in desire also is evident in my quest for a Breitling or a Panerai watch, knowing that I cannot keep time nearly as well as that Timex or Citizen. Or my search (on eBay) for a [reasonably priced] Thorens turntable with a Shure V-15 cartridge to play a vinyl album that would barely take up a few measly megabytes on my uselessly capacious iPod that I wanted so badly.

It’s not that I am some Luddite or some nostalgic, balding, pudgy, middle-aged schmuck pining for the good old days (though I am balding, pudgy, and middle-aged, a topic for another posting in the distant future… and the schmuck part has surely been debated at length). I lust after the latest technology as much as the next geek, dreaming up ways that I can finagle the latest gadget and electronic toy, standing like a drooling idiot in front of that 150 inch 1080i widescreen HD plasma screen playing the latest version of Blade Runner as I caress the programmable universal remote in my hand and try to figure out if I can connect my home and office networks so that I can surf the ‘Net, watch a movie and answer my Bluetooth enabled PDA all at the same time. But I am equally, if not even more so, drawn to the seemingly backward and time-challenged technology of gears and cogs, paper and pen, film and projection booth.

So, the question I present is this: How does one resolve the tension, bridge the chasm, as it were, that results from this dichotomy? Is there a way to explain why the feel of a Parker Centennial flowing thoughts across a 35 lbs. acid free paper is so comforting to me and yet I still lust for a touchscreen surface and handwriting recognition software? Why do I want to get up in the morning and wind my watch by hand but obsessively consult the time.gov website to get the correct time down to the thousandths of a second? Perhaps that’s our limitation as humans… our inability to divorce ourselves completely from our five senses. Though we dream big, we are anchored… no… grounded by what we can feel, see, hear, taste or smell. Perhaps in some small way, it gives us reference and perspective, a means by which to measure ourselves and our experiences.

And what of this new generation and their progeny? What will be their realities? Will they see these limitations as useless and quaint? Growing up in a time when paper has been replaced by displays, and film replaced by CGI; when the food they eat and the smells they emit have been replaced by this homogenized, sterilized, over-analyzed, steroid enhanced mocha-chino sea of products that has been evaluated and test-marketed to the n-th degree… how will they ground themselves? What will be their measuring sticks, their references? Or will they just see this as just another backward thinking tether to the past, a drag-on-my-life anchor they are more than willing to cast off on their journey to the stars?

By the way, you should expect more of these mental ramblings in future posts…