|
Written by Blake Anderson
|
|
Monday, 10 May 2010 |
|
I stood with my son on a cold and windswept mountaintop not too long ago. Ears numb with cold, fingers too stiff to fish M&Ms out of their package, we looked out across New Hampshire and Vermont in dazzling morning sunlight, leaning hard northwest against the roaring wind. He was a few hours away from setting up his first apartment. He had a lot to do…
Keys needed to be tracked down and copied. Boxes and clothes needed to be moved. Utility companies needed to open electricity and gas connections. Most importantly for a student, more important than food, furniture and a bed, the internet connection needed to be made live. That’s just the right phrase, “be made LIVE”.
There is a real urgency to this connectedness, a growing sense of unmet responsibility when we’re out of touch for long. A few years ago we kidded about “Crack-Berry” addicts, who couldn’t put their phones down, a joke that runs all the way back to Tony Robert’s character in Annie Hall. The obsession seemed to be all about the self-importance behind it. The joke was universally understood to be an indictment, no irony.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
Written by Blake Anderson
|
|
Tuesday, 26 January 2010 |
|
I’m writing this from an old cottage in the New Hampshire Highlands that we bought years ago when our kids were tiny, with the expressed intention of having a place for family time away from the blare of electronic media. In the mid-nineties, that meant NO television. For a few years, the plan worked. We had a landline phone, a mediocre stereo and, in the summer, a radio on the porch for Red Sox-by-moonlight. The children read Potter (Harry and Beatrix), played games, hiked, swam and built a monster tree house. Life was simple.
Then the technology began to leak in…
Along the way my employer forced a series of cell phones on me. I had managed to keep them confined to my car, each new car I bought would be immediately defiled by men with cordless drills, ruthlessly attaching brackets and fixtures to the shiny new dash, ripping up new carpets and upholstery to fish wires, cutting holes for the spiral antenna. All this, before the car’s first scratch. My commuting time was no longer my own, and the electronic perimeter had been extended, but it stopped at the end of the driveway.
|
|
Read more...
|
|
|
|
|
|
RSS
