Connected Lives (Part One)

My gen­er­a­tion is com­prised of folks who remem­ber life with­out much tech­nol­ogy. Some­times we joke around about it.

My girl­friends and I laugh about how our par­ents used to make us get off the tele­phone in the evening and on week­ends. We spent all day together at school, but still found things to talk about at night. I remem­ber abus­ing my “phone priv­i­leges” and hav­ing my Princess-style phone removed from my bed­room for a week. It still stands out in my mind as one of the longest weeks of my life.

Just the other day I was telling some­one that I com­muted 45 miles to attend law school. For the most part, my classes were in the evening — 6:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Dur­ing a por­tion of the four-year pro­gram, I was preg­nant. No, I did not have a cell phone. Today, I don’t walk across the street with­out my cell phone. Well, Black­berry, actu­ally. I have a per­sonal Black­berry. And one that I use solely for busi­ness. I wouldn’t dream of dri­ving 45 miles with­out tak­ing along my Blackberry.

While an under­grad­u­ate, my room­mate and I spent a lot of time in the com­puter lab — run­ning For­tran on punch cards that were processed through a main­frame. We had to “batch” our cards in a par­tic­u­lar fash­ion and put them in a bin. Peri­od­i­cally, a tech­ni­cian would emerge, gather up the cards, run the pro­grams and then gen­er­ate a report detail­ing how effi­ciently the pro­grams ran. Usu­ally, we received an error report. It was printed on wide green and white bar paper. I haven’t seen that type of paper in many years.

Later, when I returned to school to com­plete my Bach­e­lor of Sci­ence degree in Account­ing, I learned Lotus 123, Peachtree, and Word­Per­fect. The com­puter lab I haunted in those days was stocked with Lead­ing Edge dual floppy com­put­ers. In 1988, I bought one so that I could work at home. I still have it packed away in a closet. I also pur­chased a mono­chrome mon­i­tor and Epson “let­ter qual­ity” printer. I recall being so excited because my printer had two fonts: Times and arial. Life got even bet­ter when I dis­cov­ered a share­ware pro­gram that enabled me to run pro­grams from a menu rather than DOS prompts. Yes, that was before Win­dows. I paid $1,800 for the com­puter, mon­i­tor and printer.

But I was com­pletely “over the moon” the day that a law school class­mate agreed to come to my house and help me install a modem. 2400 baud. Dial-up, of course. I was freed from the law library and able to per­form legal research at home at night while my old­est child (who cel­e­brated his 21st birth­day yes­ter­day) slept and my hus­band was at work.

It all seems like so many life­times ago.

Do you ever won­der what impact tech­nol­ogy is hav­ing upon your life or the lives of your fam­ily mem­bers? Do you ever spend time recall­ing what your life was like before you had a cell phone, Black­berry or iPhone, desk­top computer(s) in your home, lap­top, portable DVD player(s) (do you have one in your car?), television(s) broad­cast­ing hun­dreds of chan­nels in every room of your house? Do you remem­ber com­mu­ni­cat­ing with other human beings using a medium other than email?

Do you remem­ber life with­out the Inter­net? Do you remem­ber life with­out blogs?

Do you ever totally dis­con­nect from any and all forms of technology?

Do you pon­der what impact being con­stantly con­nected to tech­nol­ogy in one form or another and absorb­ing so much infor­ma­tion day after day is hav­ing upon your psy­cho­log­i­cal and phys­i­cal health and well-being?

In the next five install­ments of this series, I will explore those ques­tions and more. In prepa­ra­tion, I’m giv­ing you an assign­ment: Dur­ing the com­ing week, pay atten­tion to the types of and ways in which you uti­lize tech­nol­ogy through­out the day. Be con­scious of your habits as they relate to tech­nol­ogy, and when you uti­lize a device, think about a time in your life when you did not have access to it. For instance, when you use your cell phone, think about what your life was like before you owned a cell phone or, per­haps, dur­ing your early days of cell phone own­er­ship. What type of phone did you ini­tially own and did you use it the same way and as exten­sively as you use your cell phone today? How was your life dif­fer­ent in those days? Do you think that your qual­ity of life has improved or decreased in rela­tion­ship to tech­nol­ogy? And, of course, con­tem­plate how you write now as opposed to how you wrote dur­ing other time peri­ods in your life. What has changed? What impact has tech­nol­ogy had upon your writ­ing? Do you think that you are a bet­ter writer now?

Click here to read Part Two.

Tech­no­rati Tags: Col­lo­quium on Writ­ing, Ezine Arti­cles Expert

On the Same Topic:

• Does Blog­ging Make You a Bet­ter Writer?
• The Value of a Diary
• When Did You Know You Were a Writer?
• Con­nected Lives (Part Six)
• Con­nected Lives (Part Five)