Primitive Word Processor

Primitive Word Processor (Photo credit: DaleC/@flickrfumes)


I heard someone complaining the other day that their life was so busy they didn’t have time to waste time on the Internet anymore and it got me to thinking (I know, a dangerous proposition).
As I’m not actually having conversations with anyone so much as I am hearing snippets of other peoples’ chats (nosy? No, I just have big ears) as I go about my day, I found myself agreeing with this person.
Our expectations are for immediate gratification when we are on the Internet. That’s great, too, as with broadband, we are able to be concise and efficient with our searches and for the most part are able to find what we’re looking for and then move on.
During the dial-up days we used to multi-task a lot more. We used to exercise, make coffee, crack open a frosty cold beverage (or two or three), make pancakes, love and not war, do laundry, even, while we waited for pages to load. It was fine, too. Just like when you were a kid (alright, maybe not when you were a kid) and black and white TV was all there was and it was just fine.
“I wish I could hang out on Facebook a lot like I used to!”
Me too.
Today especially, I didn’t have the time, but wanted my Facebook status to be something like, “I hate it when I tie my sneakers in double knots, forget I’ve done so, and then curse when I’m trying to take them off at the end of the day and end up creating a bad knot that takes me way too long to undo before I can take the sneaks off.”
These kinds of moments, at least for me, are reminiscent of the golden days of social media.
I know you think social media hasn’t been around long enough to have golden days.
But it has.
That’s because the world changes so fast nowadays, the golden days could be like a few weeks ago.
I remember when proprietary software was acceptable.
Now you have to be on standards-based platforms of Microsoft origin in order to have the widest adoption of your software.
Even people who like to waste time don’t have the time anymore to do so—they did when the software that drove things was proprietary; now the standard calls for efficiency and no more time wasting.
If all I did was blog maybe I could hang out a lot on Facebook, get into Twitter more (should I?) and go back to spending entire mornings online before realizing that even though I just ate breakfast (four hours ago), it is now time for lunch (and hopefully more web time afterwards).
Busy and fast, fast and busy.
That’s the way we have to be.
Some bloggers are so fast to create their postings they do things like type the word to to twice without realizing they’ve done it. My word processor knew it wasn’t a typo and even alerted me to the fact I repeated the word “to.”
That means my word processor was able to prevent a mistake other than a typo or a grammatical error.
That is comforting and sad simultaneously. Comforting because I can confidently compose here without worrying about whether I will make many mistakes that will make it to hittingthesweetspot; painful because it sometimes feels like I’m being controlled way too much by technology.
Image via CrunchBase
An event just went off on my iPhone reminding me to finish this now. Nah, who am I kidding? I’m not that important. I just want to go back online unnecessarily, look at nothing in particular and spend time I can never have back.
TTFN.