The bits, they fly through the very air around me!
We returned from Longview yesterday and settled back in to the in-laws’ house in Dallas. It’s quite nice from an access-to-the-Internet[s] perspective, as they just recently installed a wireless connection. My wife’s grandmother, although blessed with a high speed cable connection, has little need for a home/small office router/firewall combo, let alone a wireless one, and so my access to the ‘Net was constrained to limited times and a single room while in Longview.
Moving to a wireless and laptop paradigm at home has been an interesting transition and it is one that I have begun to take for granted. No longer is my Internet access confined to a single room and a single, immovable desktop. Instead, I am free to roam the house and surf at will, from the living room to the dining room to the bed room and back again. It’s wildly addicting, unfortunately, and causes me to chafe at the prospect of going without. And yes, I do realize just how sad/worrisome that is.
Information Isolation
Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m an information junkie. I have an almost insatiable desire to be “in the know”, to keep up with what’s going on in the world. These yearly trips offer me a chance to step back and reevaluate just how bad I’ve gotten, as access is never a given and always sporadic, at best. With my feed readers set up at work and at home, I am able to keep tabs on a whole host of sites, from the political to news to the technological. This ability gives me a sense of connectedness and a bit of a (false?) sense of control of my situation. It’s worrying to me to not be swimming in the information stream. I know that I’m a bit of a rarity in my desire for information, at least if my friends and family serve as any indicator. I’m forced to “cut bacK” to a blog entry every couple of days and a really thorough going-through of the headlines perhaps a bit more often.
In the end, though, it really does make me wonder: would it be so bad if I didn’t post today? What harm could possibly befall me if I don’t follow every last in and out of the NSA wiretapping “scandal”? Am I missing out on anything by removing myself from the infostream, or am I actually missing out on more of life by obsessing?
Guess I pretty much answered my own rhetorical question. G’night, then.
