So, for the last few weeks I have been out of touch.
Not just with the blog, which you may notice is woefully out of date, but with family and friends too.
For those of you who stumbled across this site, I am a man of many talents... but the talent I am paid for most often is video engineering for corporate events. [I also do most things video-related... drop me a line if you would like to chat about it!] Most of the time, I am in a hotel or a convention center with some sort of Internet access. But recently, not so much … three weeks away from home, in locations without wireless Internet access, in hotels which still have no wireless hot spots, and little time to escape to find access to the Web.
While on a break during a recent gig, I was dwelling on the lack of connectivity when suddenly, I had a revelation. Check this out…
Not much more than a decade ago, the computer (the actual hardware), was the center of the “computer experience.” Printers, monitors, speakers, scanners, joysticks, mice, and all the rest were really just peripherals. Even the Internet, that messy conglomeration of other people’s computers, was also a peripheral. With it we sent stuff to our family, we played some games, and we chatted in virtual spaces with virtual friends. But files, images, thoughts, everything we created on that computer was designed to live on a computer, either ours or someone else’s.
But that is not the case anymore. More and more we see that the Internet, that same mess of other peoples computers, is the center of the digital universe, and all other things are peripherals for it. Even the hardware we create media on, view it on, play things through, are just a piece of hardware to access the Web. Think about it… MySpace, YouTube, World of Warcraft, Second Life… all of these virtual gathering places are now the end point for so much of what we create. Our email servers often times exist somewhere else. Banking, gas and electric… heck, I even beat the lines at the DMV by going on-line.
So, the $1500 laptop I have is now a peripheral, an attachment, not the main item in my computing experience. I say peripheral because without connectivity, I am stranded. Sure, I can play some games, write, fill out invoices. But every thing I am creating with the computer is eventually going to end up traveling electronically somewhere else, either published (like this blog) or played (like Kingdom of Loathing), or posted (like my AirGorilla video). And with no access, email with job offers piles up in a virtual bin. The Gas and Electric bill goes unpaid. And, maybe worst of all, no web cam visits with my family.
Yeah… no connectivity sucks.
Comments