About

So, I was up late last night doing research for a book that I’m working on, and I had a sudden urge to start a new blog. Now to be honest, this is not my first swing at the bat. I’ve had one or two others which I ended up having to abandon during a period of intense deadlines, but I have never forgotten how helpful and stimulating a blog could can be. They saved me from a few particularly bad bouts of writer’s block, and they helped spark a couple of other successful projects for me, and now I am giving in to the need to start again, but I have a feeling that it is something bigger than the simple need to share my interests and opinions with the world, and after some mild introspection, I think I have figured it all out.

My current project is the biography of a man born at the beginning of the 20th century and whose life bridged a number of major milestones in Western History. One of the more interesting aspects of this man’s life is the immeasurable distance between the world he grew up in and the world he inhabits now. His childhood was spent in a jungle in Indonesia with no electricity, horse drawn transportation and no telecommunications of any kind. Now, as an elderly man living in a modern Canadian town, he often feels as though he lives in a completely alien world that can be very confusing and frightening at times. Even the smallest things that we take for granted can be a challenge for him which is glaringly obvious by his confusion on the phone when dealing with automated message systems. He tries to talk to the machine on the other end of the line, and he will inevitably hang-up, unsure what to do. He would never admit it, having survived World War II as a resistance fighter and paper forger for Jewish refugees escaping Hilter’s Gas Chambers, but these automated messages scare him… a lot. This is the case for many of the technological “conveniences” that we consider inconsequential or routine. It is quite sad and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t bother me.

So today, as I was working on the first chapter of his biography and trying to put myself in my subject’s mind, I realized for the first time that I am beginning to suffer some of the same kind of alienation, if only in a small way right now. As a child, home computers where still a rarity, and I had a sparkling new TI 99 4A (in case anyone remembers them) that hooked up to the living room TV. If you wanted to write out a shopping list, you had attach a memory extension, and saving it for later meant recording the screeching, modem like sounds on a cassette tape and playing it back to the computer when you wanted it recalled. If you wanted to play any games, you had to program them yourself.  A whole slue of magazines came into being that were full of 1000s of lines of code to develop your own primitive games and applications.  My first was a pong like game that took me a week to get right because the cassette tape I was using to record the game was worn out and it screwed up the screeching recall.

I’ve come a long way since then, and today, I am a faithful and devoted Linux user who likes bleeding edge distributions and repositories. I try to keep up with the latest and greatest, but I actually find myself being caught off guard from time to time. This scares me. The part that is most worrisome for me is that I cannot see the point of some of the newest stuff out there, especially with some of the newer web applications like Twitter. They often seem redundant in the face of my old standbys which do the same thing…. more or less, and this is at the root of the problem. When you think that your old cumbersome methods are better than the newer streamlined ones, your getting left behind!

I sooth myself to sleep with the assumption that this can be attributed to the rapid and exponential growth of our technological know-how, but it is unsettling nonetheless. I try to imagine what it is going to be like for me in fifty years (if the chain smoking doesn’t bite me in the ass first!) and it worries me. To me, it seems like yesterday that a 56kpbs modem was blistering and a 1 Gig processor was pure fiction. Back then I built the best cutting-edge gaming system in the neighbourhood cause I knew everything about hardware and what was at the bleeding edge of hardware development. These days, I find myself staring at the guy in the computer store like an idiot when he tells me about the latest stuff for the laptop I’m buying. I know what the stuff is, but the specifications seem all out of wack to me. While I’m exaggerating a bit, I’m beginning to sense my age when I look back at the stuff I used growing up and the stuff available now. Computers have come a long way in a short time, and I am beginning to get a little vertigo from the trip.  When I think back to the my childhood when noone had a desktop computer, when I think back to my trusty 386 DOS machine, and then I look at the laptop I’m writing this on now, I feel disjointed because the world around me wouldn’t run without them.

While I am a long way off from the type of technological and generational alienation experienced by the subject of my biography, I am beginning to sense the effects a little myself. When I asked him if he ever felt like this at my age (a whopping thirty-five) he said that he did, but after surviving the war on sawdust thickened bread and the bitter taste of constant fear, he thought that it was only reasonable for him. But, after mocking me for a few more minutes, he told me that he had felt this way at a number of points in his life, and he said that it was probably natural, but that a time will come for us all when the world will seem upside down, and you just have to adapt or file yourself away.

And so thats what this is all about.  It is about adapting to a changing world, a haphazzard attempt to keep up with the dizzying pace of a mad world that is trying hard to leave me behind.  This is my opportunity to keep myself current through the process of sharing my opinions and interests with the world, when in fact, I am doing little more than reaffirming it to myself and keeping my head in the new.  Its my way of pushing the boulder up the hill, day after day in the pointless effort to affirm myself as part of this indifferent world.  At the end of the day, I just want to keep up, and this is the path that I feel will help keep a hold of this speeding train, and that may just keep me from waking up in an alien civilization where even the smallest things are foreign and frightening.