Sometimes I wish I had a virtual self, especially now, as I write from the small town of Gescher, Germany, sitting at an old, flickering monitor, using a mouse with lumpy ball and a clunky keyboard on which the Z is where the Y should be. I feel like I've time-warped back to the early 90s. I worked in Germany then, as the resident Mac expert in a Windows-based design firm and service bureau. I was always wrangling with foreign and awkward technology.
Now, over 15 years later, the technology is smooth and sleek. Resolutions are high, mice use lasers, hard drives are measured in gigs not mbs. Yet it is the very accessbility and effortlessness of technology that creates its own burdens. We can receive and send information instantly, far faster than we can absorb or create it. Thus, the burden becomes virtual not physical. We never have enough time to fulfill the demands of our tools. We sacrifice community and family in order to be up-to-date, to respond just-in-time to our work's demands.
Here on vacation, without online access in the apartment in which I'm staying, I steal a glance now and then into the online world when visiting friends and relatives. I feel the lure and miss the rush. But I am here, in part, to remember a time when the clunkiness of technology formed a thicker wall between the physical and the virtual, a time before I had a backtop.
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