I'm baaaaaaaack to the blogosphere after weeks of gadding about China, but as you know if you were kind enough to keep up with me in abstentia, I didn't disconnect altogether but remained helplessly tethered to email and twitter and facebook and tumblr.The New York Times did an article recently about five scientists who took to the wilderness to escape the relentless bombardment of digital stimulation; in other words, to think. “There’s a real mental freedom in knowing no one or nothing can interrupt you,” observed one.
I thought China might provide that same opportunity; I'd heard twitter, blogs, gmail, facebook were firewalled. But vaulting the wall turned out to be as easy as logging into WiTopia. And once over the wall, I found myself powerless to resist partaking in virtual pleasures.
Ironically, the daughter I was travelling with is digital-averse⎯suitably agile on email and facebook, but she dislikes having to use them, preferring to communicate face to face or via printed-on-actual-dimensional paper. Which made for recurrence of an improbable late-night scenario: baby boomer hunched over a desktop, tap-tap-tapping on keyboard while millennial, engrossed in pages of hand-held literary tome, looks up now and then, asking when she'll desist.
4 comments:
Yes, I missed your posts. Funny to hear you talk about remaining tethered to much of social media while your daughter was not. I am in the middle of vacation and I let the whole thing go til today. I even forgot to leave a vaca message on my work phone til today and discovered way too many messages left unattended. I never really go on vaca w/o checking because I can't just leave the clients hanging. So, what's a few email replies, etc? Right?
Thanks, California Girl! Welcome back yourself. Admire your discipline in cutting the cord. It being August, you're probably cut slack for emails--hell, wait long enough and senders forget that they sent em ;)
Welcome home!!!
I resisted getting a cell phone forever. It wasn't until I was forced to get one for work in 1999 that I finally did. I used to laugh at the people on the exercise bikes at the gym in Hermosa Beach who were non-stop on the phone. Then I was reachable more than I liked but got accustomed to the utility of such a device. Now I can not envision being without it.
That said I always cherished road trips prior to getting that phone because it meant zero communication. Last winter I was at the top of Windham Mountain skiing and this gentleman snowboarder was on his blackberry returning a client call.
Good for your daughter. She will have a less stressful life not being wired into the Matrix like we are.
You also proved that China has a harder time censoring than we here in the States think they do. Loved your tumblr posts!
Luv image of "gentleman" snowboarder blackberrying on chairlift. Thanks for that, Howie!
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