Oh, the conveniences of the Internet (and their social and cognitive cost)

I'm not in the inner circle of the group of friends who staged this wacky photo shoot, but I love knowng people who are good about making time to get together and share their lives, pleasures, and vulnerabilities. This blog post explores some of today's pressures that may tend to push us away from the close friendships we want and need.


In a recent article for Christianity Today, writer Christina Crook describes how she saw a cross-country move that made all of her relationships into long-distance ones also make "staying in touch" come to mean scrolling through other people's social media posts. Or at least the posts of friends and family who were on social media. As for those who were not, her contact practically ended.

Can you relate?

Some of the Crook's writings on this topic over the last few years are a bit Luddite, but her views may have gained greater nuance. She seems to recognize that the tools we let hurt us aren't inherently bad, just troublesome when we don't recognize how they have affected us. She quotes former Google insider Tristan Harris who points out, "When you use technology, you have goals. When you land on YouTube, it doesn't know any of those goals. It has one goal, which is to make you forget those goals that you have."

It was while working at Google that Harris observed how many resources were being put into "making more addicting products by manipulating the vulnerabilities of its users."

Ouch. If we are to "throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles," and "run with perseverance the race marked out for us" (Hebrews 12:1-2), we need to consider what the easy and convenient communication strategies we've embraced are really costing us.

Me, I love efficiency and convenience. I consistently choose task over relationship, regret it, and do it again. So I appreciate Crook's warning and ideas for pursuing relationships in time-consuming, off-line ways instead of just the easy, online ones.

A few weeks ago our daughter got married. She and her love made fairly standard vows to one another, vows that were outrageous enough, actually. But they added some of their own. I listened with interest. Some have already been kept. "I will play video games with you... I will go see the [Grateful] Dead with you," she told him. But she also said, "I will not use your weaknesses against you," and I think that one will be harder to keep.

Would that we all kept that promise in our closest relationships. It's worth committing to, and worth trying again when we fail. But how distressing it is that the games we play, our bosses and those who work for us, companies we patronize, and the media channels we enlist or consume seem to almost systematically use our vulnerabilities against us. As for the social media channels, though they can certainly be harnessed for good, they tend to distract us from our values, priorities, and goals and work to make us forget them.

It's pretty sick, isn't it? What will we do about it?

"...How have we been co-opted into society’s push for productivity over presence, and what have we lost in the process?" asks Christina Crook "...The inefficient way is also the way to love, and without love we have nothing."

Read the article, Unfriending Convenience.

Strategies for Conducting Interviews over the Phone

Well, it looks like I'll make it through National Novel Writing Month without accidentally writing a novel. Again! My guess is that I never will write fiction (much as I enjoy reading it). Every now and then, though, someone will ask if I think I'll write another book.

Both Through Her Eyes and Crossing Cultures with Ruth dropped in my lap, the first from a couple of busy cross-cultural workers in Central Asia who knew the stories of women like them ought to be told, and second as a write-for-hire job from a ministry that knew I was a fan of their initial book and had what it took to expand it. In both cases my job was to collect and pass along the wisdom and experience of others rather than any of my own. This I was happy to do.

In fact, it's the main way I've used my writing and editing skills these last 20+ years, usually writing without a byline and often in collaboration with a team or partner who had a message to share but needed help putting it into words. These days, it's mostly articles for the web and email publications.

If you count all the notetaking, editing, and writing these last few weeks, I may have exceeded the 50,000-word goal of NaNoWriMo this month. But the bigger breakthrough for me is this:

I finally assembled the right tools and strategies for getting rich interviews over the phone and capturing the content effectively and efficiently.

1. A good list of contacts engaged with the topic I'm writing about.
2. Access to contact data that helps me track them down.
3. Carefully timed emails asking for a 15-minute phone call to pick their brain and hear the story.
4. A new headset that allows me to talk and type comfortably, gracefully, and simultaneously. 

In the past, I'd tried using Skype. But that didn't work very well for me. The audio-only phone connection may make rapport more difficult but eases the work on other fronts: I don't have to maintain eye contact and non-verbal cues but can focus fully on capturing what is said. Moreover, several people I've interviewed have taken the call on the road, putting on their own headsets to redeem drive time on some boring stretch of highway. I think it set them at ease and made them more generous with their time than if we'd been using something like Skype or Facetime.

Another factor I'd considered was finding a way to record the interviews and then transcribe them, but the transcription process takes more time than I think I can give and actually slows down the writing process as well, so I'm glad to "settle" for copious notes, instead (though they still need to be cleaned up and organized). 

During Caleb Project days, we nearly always worked in pairs, and while it required both teamwork and discipline, the results were great; one person would lead the interview while the other madly but quietly scribbled notes (and then typed them up later).

Trying to replicate this solo hasn't worked well for me. My notes weren't as good and my rapport wasn't either, and the time it took to type them up and fill in the gaps was considerable. Bringing a laptop or tablet for notetaking made for more complete and accurate notes. It was a little better for rapport, too, since I can type without watching what I'm doing, but my laptop is both too big and it was still a a barrier. I was looking for a new approach. And this one works well.

The folks I've interviewed seemed to enjoy it too. None of them has seemed ready to stop after 15 minutes, but have typically given me 30-60 minutes. After all, I'm giving them the chance to talk about things they're passionate about. I've made sure to tell them how grateful I was for their time and made sure to pray with them and for them about the things they shared.

This new strategy may make interviewing over the phone (despite my lifelong aversion to making phone calls) more effective than video conferencing or even talking face to face. Had I put these pieces together sooner, I'm sure my Master's thesis could have been better; I'd left the door open for follow-up phone interviews but failed to follow through since I didn't have an efficient strategy for making it work.

But all this gives me hope for future research and writing projects using phone interviews.

Who knows, maybe even something that will take the form of a book.

Ways to Keep from Keeping up with the Times

Meet 13-year old Morgan Pozgar, 2007 winner
of the LG National Texting Championship.

It may be part of why so many beginning writers try their hand at memoirs about their early days (as vulnerable as that can make you feel) or historical fiction (which require a ton or research, or leaves you open to a great deal of criticism). Writing about contemporary life is harder than it seems. That's because the world has changed so very much, and it doesn't seem to stop!

How do you keep the language or behavior in your young adult novel from sounding like they came from 20, 30 years ago, when you were a young adult yourself? How do you write a kid's book that reflects the world today's kids actually live in? And if you do happen to get the contemporary references right, is your book going to sound out-of-date before it gets out of its first printing?

Movie making would be even harder in this respect. Pour millions of dollars into a piece that before you know it, attracts jeers from viewers or would-be viewers who make fun of the clothes, hair, language .... and the technology.

Novelist Ann Patchett doesn't like technology. And especially she doesn't like the way the ubiquity of technology screws up her intended plot lines. She doesn't want readers or reviewers exclaiming, "Why didn't she just Google that?" "Why didn't he text her and tell her where he was?" Because it would kill the suspense, wouldn't it?

So she writes the story the way she wants to, but has people's cell phones lost or stolen, their batteries and computers die... whatever it takes to get magic techno solutions out of the way. Patchett is a Luddite herself, perhaps unsurprisingly. On the side, she owns and helps run a brick-and-mortar bookstore in Nashville, TN (and refuses to upgrade her flip phone).

I just read and enjoyed her book State of Wonder, carefully set off the grid in the Amazon jungle. That isolation factor itself plays a significant role in creating the novel's tension. I read it from the glowing rectangle of my iPad, of course, though characters in the book pass around carefully plastic-wrapped hardback copies of a set of Dickens.

See Author Ann Patchett Talks about How She Avoids Modern Tech in State of Wonder (Washington Post).

Odd jobs, new ones, and those soon to be obsolete

About a year ago I wrote about a woman I met who had one of those jobs I didn't know people had... as a pretend patient to train medical students. New jobs crop up all the time these days. Back in the late 50's when my mother's parents urged her to become a teacher (a suggestion that didn't stick) they probably had no idea that the career as a software tester she'd eventually pursue was even an option. Who'd imagine it? As Douglas Adams once said,

“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things.”

One of my favorite movies, Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's Desk Set, explores the tensions of a group of information specialists afraid of being made obsolete by a computer, one that probably had less power than the phone you carry in your pocket.

Such tensions haven't gone away, but gotten "worse." Today I came across an article from a 2014 edition of The Economist assessing the likelihood that various livelihoods will disappear as people are replaced by machines. The article is behind a pay wall, but here's a chart summarizing their predictions along with a caption:

"Which jobs will be obsolete in 20 years and which are likely to survive? We looked at the impact of automation in an article last year. Telemarketers and accountants beware. Personal trainers, dentists and the clergy are unlikely to disappear any time soon." http://econ.st/1KKj91U

Thomas Friedman, lifelong learning & "curiosity quotient"

In recent months I've spent a chunk of nearly every day scanning for interesting stories to feed the Mission Catalyst Twitter stream. It now has more than a thousand followers. Seems like a good application of what we say on the website, that "our staff read and distill dozens of mission-oriented news sources so you won’t have to, while providing easy access so you can learn more."

Trolling for news so much is doing weird things to my brain; I think need to be more efficient with it and set up some boundaries, as well as prioritizing some less frenetic activities. My former way of life felt more balanced, but I should acknowledge that the housework and cooking that take up time I used to give to reading books and getting out (socially and for exercise) are also, in their own way, life-giving. Anything that takes me away from my computer from time to time is good.

News-sleuthing, though, is a good fit for my bent towards, "hey, have you heard about this?" I love good stories and ideas. Collecting and sharing information with others is part of what I feel like I was born to do. It's great to have a job that capitalizes on cultivating that curiosity and making those connections.

A New York Times editorial from Thomas Friedman says that increasingly, such skills will be required for every "decent job." Lifelong learners have an advantage; such habits help them be more flexible and resilient. That's because whatever we know and know how to do is going to become obsolete faster and faster.

Now, notes Craig Mundie, one of Microsoft’s top technologists, not just elites, but virtually everyone everywhere has, or will have soon, access to a hand-held computer/cellphone, which can be activated by voice or touch, connected via the cloud to infinite applications and storage, so they can work, invent, entertain, collaborate and learn for less money than ever before. Alas, though, every boss now also has cheaper, easier, faster access to more above-average software, automation, robotics, cheap labor and cheap genius than ever before. That means the old average is over. Everyone who wants a job now must demonstrate how they can add value better than the new alternatives.

When the world gets this hyperconnected, adds Mundie, the speed with which every job and industry changes also goes into hypermode. “In the old days,” he said, “it was assumed that your educational foundation would last your whole lifetime. That is no longer true.”

Friedman goes on to say:

How to adapt? It will require more individual initiative. We know that it will be vital to have more of the “right” education than less, that you will need to develop skills that are complementary to technology rather than ones that can be easily replaced by it and that we need everyone to be innovating new products and services to employ the people who are being liberated from routine work by automation and software. The winners won’t just be those with more I.Q. It will also be those with more P.Q. (passion quotient) and C.Q. (curiosity quotient) to leverage all the new digital tools to not just find a job, but to invent one or reinvent one, and to not just learn but to relearn for a lifetime. 

The rest of the article deals more with government and politics, but you can check it out here.

Principles of Acquisition

My husband and I recently had a small squabble about how to cook rice. He thought we (I) needed a rice cooker, whereas I resisted, more comfortable with my old-fashioned pots and pans. I had similarly tried to persuade our kids that an ice cream scoop was an unnecessary possession in a house with an ample collection of spoons.

As such household debates have unfolded I've come to realize we operate on different principles. I want to have as few tools as possible, but all of them multi-purpose. (Same girl wants to have one purse or one pair of shoes that goes with everything). Hubs is by no means extravagant - he wants to justify every purchase on multiple grounds. But he does like his shiny tools, and he tends to think anything must be better if there's a cord to plug it in.

Our kitchen has lots of storage space and our wedding guests flooded us with department store gift cards, so the happy solution is that we make room for both approaches. We have the space for both pots and pans, and the small appliances... for universally useful utensils, and for specialized ones.

We got the rice cooker. It works fine and will probably stick or spill less than my rice cooked on the stove. Those ten-pound bag of frozen chicken and a 20-pound bag of rice from Costco should mean there's always something in the house to make for dinner. And since Hubs likes the gadgets, I'll have no qualms delegating the dinner-making back to him - at least in theory. It would help if we weren't both overextended these days. I may have to give in and buy the story about how getting a crock pot would make our lives easier too. So far I have resisted.   

Questions:

1. What household tools and appliances have you found the most delightful? What do you use the most? 
2. Which ones seem a waste of space and money for you? What stays in the drawer or cupboard?

My New Laptop Cord, and Marketers v. Lawyers

Maybe I told you how the day before I went to Siberia the power cord for my Toshiba laptop suddenly stopped working. I barely had enough juice to make a backup of files before abandoning the whole machine to the care of a clever friend. I finished my day's editing work on a computer at our local library, packed up, and went to the other side of the planet.

It turned out to be less a problem than I'd expected. Reduced to an iPod Touch and portable keyboard - gifts from a generous friend - I had little trouble keeping up with notes and correspondence while overseas. All I'd need to get my email, etc. was an internet connection, and that was not so hard to come by in a prosperous city. Even in Siberia. Remarkable how our tech needs have shifted from software and hardware to services and access, isn't it?

Meanwhile, back in Littleton, my tech friend discovered where my laptop cord was broken. He sliced off the end, soldered on a new piece from a machine in the junk pile, and carefully bound it up with duct tape.

This fix worked for almost five months. Then the connection, loosened by my usual degree of rough-ish handling, stopped working consistently. Sometimes it produced sparks! 
 
Chris noticed when he came to visit. This man of mine has a special relationship with technology - the way some people are great with kids or trusted by animals. It's a little eerie. I sense his equipment would never end up in such sorry shape. We shall see how patient he is with me and my ways. Or maybe he'll reform me.

"Fire danger," he declared. "We'll have to see about getting a new cord." I nursed it another month or so before I knew: It was time. The cord was getting too temperamental. I'd have to take action.

Monday I shopped around online and ordered my new cord. To my amusement the supplier was able to identify a great many features possessed by my new power cord, including a "Velcro cord management system." How's that for playing up a piece of plastic-coated fabric that sticks to itself? I said to myself: Marketers have been here!

Today the box came, and I saw that the lawyers had bested the marketers. Or at least they made sure they'd have their say. Three little booklets with a total of 75 pages of information and instructions, some in other languages. Also an extra piece of paper with this ominous threat:

WARNING: Handling the cord on this product will expose you to lead, a chemical known to the State of California to cause birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling.

Questions: 

1. Do you still use a laptop? Some? Less than you used to? Other devices serve you just as well?

2. Do you see the inclusion of a piece of Velcro as a "feature"?

3. Would you wash your hands after handling a computer cord that might expose you to lead? Do you think the State of California is onto something?

4. Do you pay more attention to marketers, or lawyers, or view both through a veil of skepticism?

5. Did you know that snake charmers play music because the instrument looks like a stick for hitting the snake, not because snakes can be charmed by music? No ears. Oh, wait, that has nothing to do with this blog post.

Forsaking My Fame with Strangers

About a month ago I left my  laptop behind and went to spent a few weeks in a city on the other side of the planet - leaving the blog untended. Yet to my surprise, "hits" skyrocketed, especially from Europe and Asia.

This was not due to my benign neglect. It was because Google picked up my blog as the source of a public-domain picture I'd probably discovered on someone else's blog. If you searched Google images on "book" or "books," Telling Secrets was now one of your destinations. Well, you could do worse. I am a bookish person after all... maybe some of the folks that got here through such means would want to stick around?

I finally decided to remove the image that was bringing so many visitors. More than I wanted traffic, I wanted clues to who, of the people I know and readers I've had some contact with, is actually stopping by. So: so long, strangers. At least some of you. I expect my traffic reports will go from 80 hits a day back down to 20-30.

>> Bloggers, have you ever had this happen? Did any of you make the choice I did and take steps to turn the new traffic away?

Comment Policy

Got something to say? This blog is a nice outlet for me and at least occasionally of interest or help to some of you. But it does tend to feel rather one-sided, huh?

Recently I turned off the settings that made potential leavers-of-comments "register." Now you can comment at will and see your words appear immediately. Voila! Unless you are a spammer. In which case you may not get through; Blogger has finally got a system set up to flag spam comments. Slowly, slowly, they are catching up.

I still plan to move to Wordpress. I just haven't gotten around to it.

E.B. White on New Media (c. 1938)

In the same tradition as Ann Lindbergh’s Gift from the Sea and various writings of Wendell Berry, E.B. White’s One Man’s Meat explores the costs and side effects of modernization on our society in the last century or so. Among the more haunting bits of prescience are his observations about how journalism and entertainment - and the technologies that diffuse them - were, even then, making profound changes in how people see the world. He wrote in a 1938 essay:

“Lately I haven’t had time to read the papers, as I have been building a mouseproof closet against a rain of mice. But sometimes, kindling a fire with last week’s Gazette, I glance through the pages and catch up a little with the times…

“The news of television… is what I particularly go for when I get a chance at the paper; for I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky…"

“It must have been two years ago that I attended a television demonstration at which it was shown beyond reasonable doubt that a person sitting in one room could observe the nonsense taking place in another. I recall being more amused by what was happening in the tangible room where I sat than by what appeared in the peephole of science… Since then I have followed the television news closely.”

“Radio has already given sound a wide currency, and sound ‘effects’ are taking the place once enjoyed by sound itself. Television will enormously enlarge the eye’s range, and, like radio, will advertise the Elsewhere. Together with the tabs, the mags, and the movies, it will insist that we forget the primary and the near in favor of the secondary and the remote. More hours in every twenty-four will be spent digesting ideas, sounds, images – distant and concocted. In sufficient accumulation, radio sounds and television sights may become more familiar to us than their originals.” (italics mine)

White was writing in a day when millions of Americans had never made a long-distance phone call. We've come a long way since then. But our global connections sometimes seem quite costly:

“When I was a child people simply looked about them and were moderately happy; today they peer beyond the seven seas, they bury themselves waist deep in tidings, and by and large what they see and hear makes them unutterably sad.”

Politics and Religion on Facebook

"In what may be the first comprehensive study of its kind, a University of Colorado Denver Business School student has revealed the top reasons for Facebook unfriending, who is unfriended and how they react to being unfriended," I read in Science Daily, following a friend's tweet about it. 

"After surveying more than 1,500 Facebook users on Twitter, [PhD candidate Christopher] Sibona found the number-one reason for unfriending is frequent, unimportant posts.

'The 100th post about your favorite band is no longer interesting,' he said.

"The second reason was posting about polarizing topics like religion and politics.

"'They say not to talk about religion or politics at office parties and the same thing is true online,' [said Sibona].

"Inappropriate posts, such as crude or racist comments, were the third reason for being unfriended."

>> See Top Reasons for Facebook Unfriending

Not surprising findings, are they? I have yet to unfriend anyone, but I'm uncertain if others have unfriended me. I've been known to block certain people's updates from appearing in my Facebook stream (at least for a time, in hopes that their latest distasteful rant or enthusiasm will ebb). Certainly I hide all the game updates.

It's those politics postings that are most likely to get under my skin; I don't want to hear about your politics. On the whole I'm much more interested in religion (of any flavor), though I may cringe on occasion. So, I suppose, I'm taking offense at your politics and expecting you to be OK with my religion. Hardly sounds fair, does it?

If only politics weren't such a battle. So much blood and ink poured out over causes that I tend to think matter little. But I have at least a few atheist and agnostic friends that would say the same about religion. I know many people who are careful to avoid politics and/or religion discussions in most contexts, regardless of their feelings on such matters. Others seem to write only about one of those topics or the other. It's their beat.

I'm not sure who I write for, at least in this social media environment. I tend to be haphazard instead of deliberate about such things. But as I am a professional religious person - I've been working for Christian organizations since the mid-90s - it turns out that a good 80% or more of my almost 500 Facebook friends are ministry contacts and tend to be devout evangelical Christians. Some are pretty rigid in their thinking; others, more flexible. All of them - as far as I know - are human.

I didn't set out to use Facebook as a way to stay in touch with business colleagues but I haven't stopped it from happening. The same is true of my (smaller number of) Twitter followers and I think of my blog readers, as well. This means the things that I do (or in which I am implicated) online may have a fairly direct impact on how my professional colleagues see me, and sometimes that is uncomfortable, especially since other contacts in each environment are using the same tools in ways that are purely personal. 

In posting on Facebook or similar contexts I guess we just have to ask: For whom are we writing? Whom will we lose or offend, and is that a price we're willing to pay?

Tech Wars, Mostly Internal

I'm in the midst of a battle with technology and my identity as an intelligent but, yes, somewhat tech-averse person. I'm trying to figure out how to give another website, for which I am responsible, a facelift. I may be tech-averse, but I'm not beauty- or grace-averse, and this thing could use some of each.

It's running on a WordPress platform, long reputed the most friendly and popular - yet professional - of our most likely allies. I wanted to believe their claims that installations, updates, and backups would be fast and easy: five minutes!  Get started in five minutes! I have been dismayed to find that - in my case at least - this was not going to be accurate. Sigh.

I'm not starting from scratch - though one of my strategies is to set up a fake site to practice on, simulating what I'm after until I can do the same to the real site. But even setting up a new, clean site (it has to be self hosted) has revealed to me that once again I don't know what I'm talking about, that I don't have what I need, e.g., access to a server.

The site to which I refer - now the host of some 200 posts - was set up for me by a friendly, tech-savvy person while I was on sabbatical. It's just that I can't figure out how the darn thing works, at least not beyond a certain point. I finally asked my buddy - hesitating because now he's on sabbatical - how to get at the server so I could make backups (as WP advises) as well as upload a fresh, new theme. He writes: "Yes, sorry, forgot about that. Since we have [three other websites] all running on that server, I don't think that you want to mess around with it."

I think this probably means, "We don't want you messing around with it." Given my evident lack of skill, this may be a very wise restriction indeed. Somehow or other, though, it must be overcome.

The best of all possible solutions, as I see it, would be finding away for someone-who-is-not-me to handle such matters (under my direction!) Too good to be true?

What do you avoid? Do you ever wonder if this a matter of wisdom and boundaries, or shirking and laziness?

It's possible I will have to strap on my sword and slay this tech dragon, myself. Or, to use a more constructive metaphor, tame the beast.

Losing Track of Time

The Persistence of Memory, by Salvador Dali.
Some days I could use a bit more persistence.

Sometimes I send emails and post things to the Internet while I'm traveling and don't tell my computer we're in a different time zone. I don't know if that's ever caused significant confusion for anybody; often I'm just off by an hour or two.

But this summer I quite confused myself when, after looking at my computer's calendar settings to see what day of the week something was happening, I accidentally moved my computer's date settings ahead by several months.

I didn't realize the problem until I was looking for something in my "sent mail" and discovered it seemed to have been sent several weeks in the future. I changed my settings back, but when the future became the present and then the past, my correspondence was out of order and intermingled.

"Don't get ahead of yourself," advised my friend S :-) Maybe that's the only lesson to learn here.

When we visited the clock and watch museum in Pennsylvania (see previous post A Brief History of Time Keeping) I was fascinated to learn how new are our notions of time and how to measure it . America's railroad operators initiated the movement to promote a common standard. "The day with two noons" in November 1883 was an attempt to keep trains from colliding and reduce the number of passengers in one city from missing their connections in another.

Do you think I could miss a deadline and cover it up with an explanation that I'm simply operating off a lunar calendar or that my clock wound down a few weeks ago?

A Source of Meaningless Affirmation

I had a coworker who must have heard that women like it if men notice their clothes. At seemingly random intervals he would ask, "Is that a new outfit?" Rarely could I answer his affirmation in the affirmative, alas. Not much of a fashionista, I guess. But he's a good man and I believe he meant well. I tried to accept his words in the spirit in which they were offered!

I've thought of those days when periodically scanning the spam filter of the Wordpress site we use for Missions Catalyst. Nearly all the comments that make it into that folder are designed to please. While some of the originating addresses suggest sites I would not want to put before my eyes, the comments themselves are seldom offensive and sometimes amusing.

Here's one piece of flattery to brighten your day:

Thanks for this unique fantastic piece of content; this is the kind of consideration that maintains me though out the day. I have forever already been looking close to for a web-site following I over heard about them from a close friend and was delighted when I was able to uncover it just after researching for a while. Being a passionate blogger, I’m happy to find out other folks taking effort and giving to your community. I just desired to review to display my appreciation in your submit as it is particularly encouraging, and lots of internet writers will not get the credit score they should have. I am positive I’ll be again and can send out some of my buddies.

Strangely, the source of this comment is an organization that maintains a website about treatments for Lyme disease. Apparently they're eager to get the word out. Or perhaps they have been infected with a virus that sends out such words on their behalf.

Others say things like:

Great info! I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don’t know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

and...

Great site. A lot of useful information here. I’m sending it to some friends!

Do you suppose they have a random compliment generator - or do they say these things to all the blogs?

Vulnerable to Digital Overload?

All the time I was growing up I saw terrible statistics about how many hours the average American spent in front of the television. Supposedly this made us lazy and dumb and materialistic and incapable of focusing on anything for more than five minutes. I did my share of TV watching, at times: in eighth grade I remember coming home after school, making enormous snacks, and watching show after show until Mom got home. But by the time I was halfway through high school my days were too full for that sort of thing, and I've never gone back to it.

Not unless you count the endless hours of TV I "watched" in Uzbekistan, where I lived with a local family and had no choice in the matter. But of course since I couldn't understand a lot of what I saw, it couldn't stimulate or numb, fragment or distract me as programming in my own language might.

Yet the internet has done to me what television never did. While logging on gives me an initial sense of peace or connectedness, my online behavior takes me from one small stimulus to another so quickly that after an hour or two I sometimes come away as dazed as if I'd spent the time madly flipping television channels or glued to one of those modern news shows full of short, frightening stories, overlaid with sidebars and breaking news scrolling across the bottom. Overstimulated and jumpy.

Tearing myself away from looking for messages, checking on this and that, I do something physical like tidying up the kitchen or going for a walk. Or I do some writing - even on the computer - or read a book. It's still media, but feels completely different.

Now that I'm working from home and have a reliable computer and great Internet connection - even without  an iPhone in my pocket - I think I will need some limits. Not like my friend's ten-year-old son, who is only allowed two hours of "screen time" a day, but certainly no more than two hours at a stretch. It wouldn't hurt to schedule some two-hour meal breaks with no electronic devices nearby. I think I'll need regular vacations from 2010 just to stay sane.

The NPR program "Fresh Air" included an interview on this topic today. See Digital Overload: Your Brain on Gadgets.

My Story of Stuff

For someone who is such a network / resource person I keep a pretty low profile on technology. At least on hardware and things that include a monthly fee. I'm cautious about such matters, wanting to weigh them out carefully before I make an investment that may cost a lot and not necessarily pay off.

Right now the distance between me and "cutting edge" is about as big as it has ever been in relative, 2010 terms. After all, I amused myself driving cross-country by listening to cassette tapes on the stereo in my 1998 car - only the third car I've ever owned - stopped to take pictures with my 2005 camera - the first digital I ever purchased - and wondered why I wasn't picking up a signal on the very basic, 100-minutes-a-month mobile phone I got for free from Virgin Mobile. I don't own an "i" anything.

It's not that I'm bad with tech stuff, or afraid of it. Just cautious, and kind of a skinflint. My conservative habits help me keep on my slender budget, and save me grey cells to use keeping up on other things that are more important to me. And being on sabbatical, trying to live a quieter, more balanced life, I opted to defer the stress related to making unnecessary decisions or changes. (See my post on life, change, and stress).

Yet now as we come to an end of the sabbatical, I anticipate working alone and from my home for at least a season. I'm wondering if a giant leap forward, tech-wise, is in my future.

I did already do this one thing: I talked to my roommate about setting up a wireless network in the house. Can you believe I've gone this long without one? For a long time I could pick up signals in the neighborhood - no longer - or occasionally borrow the roommate's little plug-in modem. Mostly, though, I took my laptop to the library or a series of nearby coffee shops.

Frankly, this was a way to keep some boundaries in my life. The thought of being able to do anything on the internet anytime I wanted - to live a complex, social life without getting out of my pajamas - didn't sound too healthy to me. I wasn't sure I could be trusted.

But I told Deb I wanted to give it a try. She did the research and made the leap. We're all hooked up. So when I get home, I'll have high-speed access to anything and everything. I'll be able to blow off the dust on my seldom-used Skype equipment.

And, I suppose, I'll want to set some new boundaries to keep me from abusing that and spending too much time in front of a screen.

 Here are some essay questions for you, dear reader:

Thinking about the tech changes and purchases you've made in the last five years...

1. Which changed your life the most?
2. Which had the most positive effects?
3. What negative effects did you experience, and how did you compensate for or contain them?
3. Are there any tech upgrades that were really a waste of money or that you regret?

On and Off the Grid

Spies Like Us - Well, They Like Me

As I started writing this post, my computer was flashing security alerts trying to get me to run a piece of software I didn't previously have in order to get rid of some virus it claimed was just about to bring about the end of the world as we know it. I'm pretty sure the alerts themselves were the result of a sneaky piece of spyware that wanted me to collude with its own evil conspiracy, but maybe I'm just paranoid.

At any rate, I'm getting ready to leave town soon and decided it was best to go ahead and take the computer into an actual shop to be exorcised. Other options for getting IT help at present are few. But this is a rather expensive choice and one I made reluctantly.

I might be persuaded that it is time to buy a new machine but hardware is not like something organic, is it, where susceptibility to illness might result from age? So, the spyware problem itself does not tell me it is time to go shopping. Though I know the time will not be too far off. It's a 2007 machine. Horrors!

I might buy a Mac, I know that's what you're going to say. They don't (generally) have these particular problems and they come with all kinds of cool abilities. But not ones I anticipate I would use. And the inconvenience (and this time, expense) of periodic problems with spyware is not, I think, offset by the inconvenience of becoming a Mac user in a PC world, and learning new systems (I =like= PC's better!) or the expense of the Apple machines themselves and the software I'd need for my work. So, that's what it comes down to for me. I would, however, like to be more certain that my next machine is as well protected as it can be, to really understanding what keeps it that way, and how to tell if it is in trouble, and what to do if it is. I'm too much of an idiot with this aspect of technology. This week I pay the price.

If you're curious, I'm writing from a computer at my neighborhood library. I'll stop by again tomorrow. And hope to have my laptop back sometime on Friday or Saturday. I paid in advance. They will give me most of my money back if they can't fix it.

America's Energy Grid

What I wanted to write may be related. National Geographic's latest issue included an article about the US energy grid. I like the science articles in NGM because they have good pictures (!) and are often fairly easy for the non-scientist (like me) to grasp. And unlike some of my readers I am more comfortable than put off by what folks call the liberal media. Not unquestioning, but comfortable.

Apparently America's power grid (or grids - there are actually three of them; Texas gets its own!) run on quite antiquated technology - not three years old (like my poor antique laptop) but five to ten decades old. They can't store power when it's not being used; can't tell if there's a problem until it's caused lots of other problems, and most troubling of all, are powered by dirty and nonrenewable energy sources. Yup, half of America's electricity comes from coal. Coal-powered generators produce nearly a third of our mercury emissions, a third of our smog, two thirds of our sulfur dioxide (OK, I don't really know what that is!) and nearly a third of our carbon dioxide emissions. Yet the way the system is set up, any other approach is going to bring about significant cost increases, making it a pretty tough sell to politicians, taxpayers, consumers. So, what's to be done?

Power outages cost Americans something like $80 billion a year and are likely to increase.

The article does make some good suggestions; check it out if you're interested in exploring the topic more.

You Think We Got Trouble?

I can't help but think of other places I've been that have far fewer resources and far less reliable utilities. I remember staying in a flat in Azerbaijan, back in 1995, which was lit by two dim lightbulbs, one hanging bare from the ceiling of each of the two rooms. You couldn't have both of them on at once. If you wanted to plug in anything else you had to turn off both lights. And this in a city known for its oil reserves and amazing resources of wind power (well, potential wind power. Wind anyway). Yet such issues ought to be put in perspective there as well. Weren't a million people displaced by the war with Armenia not too many years before? That created/reflected bigger problems than how to improve the energy grid.

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Life, Change, and Stress

The Overload Syndrome: Learning to Live within Your Limits, by Richard Swenson

No wonder that so many people are stressed out so much of the time, says Swenson: We are living lives that are overloaded. More and more of us live as if we have 10 percent more time, money, and energy than we really have. Every human being has limits, but we tend to deny them – and experience fairly predictable results.

Where does this push to do more, to achieve more, to be in control of more actually come from? It seems to be the inevitable fruit of the religion of progress. We think that more and more should be accomplished with greater and greater efficiency. And while, amazingly, this continues to work (somewhat), the cost is high. We find ourselves facing a complexity of life that is beyond our capacity to absorb and adapt to. We have tremendously high expectations for our lives. We are saturated with media, information, and choices. We turn to work, spending, and busyness to accomplish things they just can’t deliver.

“There are only so many details that can be comfortably managed in anybody’s life. Once this number has been exceeded, one of two things happens: disorganization or frustration. … Every year we have more products, more information, more technology, more activities, more choices, more change, more traffic, more commitments, more work. In short, more of everything. Faster." (p. 43)

Swenson’s comments about change and choice, knowledge and information really hit home with me:

“William Shakespeare was born in 1564. When he died in 1616, the world around him was not very different from the world he was born into. .. and so it has been from generation to generation, for century upon century. …there has been more change from 1900 to present than in all of recorded history prior to 1900. And there is no deceleration in sight.” (p 73)

“If in 1950 we had ten activities to chose from, today – compliments of progress – we have a thousand.” (p. 65)

If, as Swenson (a medical doctor) claims, stress is basically “an internal physiologic adaptation to any change in our environment,” living a low(er?)-stress life in today’s world is going to take some serious counter-cultural living. Things like deciding not to buy any new clothes, to cancel most of one’s media subscriptions, or to stay in the same house or job even if something "better" is available. Downward mobility. Ruthlessly pruning activities; deciding to give up hurry.

Frequent moves, new jobs, changing fashions, new opportunities, new products and services and programs – constant upgrades – all sound great, but each one means making changes. And we only have so much capacity for change.

Today’s tidal wave of knowledge and information is also overwhelming. This is what I've been dealing with lately, having pulled back from my job as a gatherer and disseminator of information. Even though I love it. I really needed this break.

I suppose we could just be grateful to have so much at our fingertips, but it is so hard to unplug, or to live with mystery or ignorance when so much is out there for the knowing. I don't know about you, but I feel pressure to have opinions about so many things, to make educated decisions about ever-changing and increasingly complex issues, and to simply “keep up” with the world. Yet this pursuit frequently leads to frustration.

“Francis Bacon, a contemporary of Shakespeare, is regarded by historians as the last person to know everything in the world. Since then, each of us learns a progressively smaller percentage of all the information that exists…. Furthermore, there is no reason to suspect that the situation will suddenly reverse, giving us a chance to catch up.” (p. 136)

Unplugging is increasingly difficult. Even when not tempted, internally, I feel pressured, externally. Feel as if I must defend my position on this. To truly pull away seems irresponsible or at least anti-social. There must be something wrong with you if you don’t have an iPhone, or if you aren’t on Facebook, or your computer or camera or MP3 player is a couple years old and less fashionable and can’t do what someone else’s can. Swenson was writing in 1998, but even then he marveled at the trouble and expense he saw people making in order to give away their precious privacy, silence, and solitude, primarily through our commitment to the latest communication technologies.

“We have no excuse left for not being on-call for the universe.” (p. 45)

No wonder we are – I am – so often overwhelmed. Who can keep up?

My only real criticism of Swenson’s book is that, ironically enough, it is written in an up-to-the-minute style – chock full of statistics and “current” examples that probably worked great for the presentations he was giving at the time but seem quite dated now more than a decade later. If you're looking for something more recent that to quote/reference/recommend, you might try Swenson's just released In Search of Balance: Keys to a Stable Life. I've got a hold on it at the library. My guess is it would cover some similar ground, with more recent data. Both are from NavPress and are "Christian" books though the author teaches in secular settings as well.

Two More Years, She Said

What kinds of things do you want to inspect personally and bring home yourself, and what would you just as soon purchase online?

A quart of milk, a bouquet of daffodils, or a bag of frozen peas would generally go in the first category, I think. You can buy them online if you want to, but for more trouble and expense than stopping by the grocery store.

Many personal items are things I’d prefer to inspect in person. Too often, clothes ordered from a catalog or website seem to be the wrong shade or cut, after all, when they arrive. And in spite of the great deals at places like Zappos or eBags, they, too, sell items I would rather touch and see in three dimensions before making a purchase.

And (unless you’re buying something electronic which you can download) there’s a bit of a moral aspect to this kind of thing. Do we really want to opt for purchases that are shipped half way around the world, cheap for the consumer but expensive for the environment, over doing without or buying local?

Sometimes I’ll browse in a regular store and then buy online. It’s nice to have that option. I know bookstores and libraries won’t be going away anytime soon, so for books I go those places first. I’m quick to look, slow to purchase.

But I wonder how long we’ll have that option with the music industry. I was thinking about replacing some of the cassette tapes I’ve worn out with CDs. Yes, I know that statement marks me as pretty old fashioned on several accounts! But I still want something physical, particularly with my computer in the last year of its life; downloading music and burning my own CDs or other backups seems an inferior solution, compared with just getting music on CD.

My last online purchase of a used CD was muffed by an Amazon seller who instead sent me a paperback book called “Astrology on the Light Side of the Brain,” intended for a Wisconsin woman named Katherine. Oops. Sorry Katherine. I'll put it back in the mail.

So I went shopping. And found, well, hardly anything. Nobody seemed to carry more than a minimal selection. I wasn’t entirely surprised, but I struck up a conversation with a clerk and asked her for the industry scoop.

“They’re telling us to give CDs two more years,” she said. “Smaller sellers have stopped carrying them altogether, and larger sellers can keep them only if they sell them at a loss.”

I think I’ll keep buying CDs – at a modest rate – while I can get them. When they become passé I’ll tuck them away in the antique buffet where we store our LPs. Still play those sometimes, too. Do you?