Technology, the world, and you (and us)

Technology is fantastic. Do you realize people all around the globe carry tiny computers in their pockets each and every day?! And it gives them access to knowledge and personal contact with people on the opposite side of the planet as them?! 

“The world at my fingertips! Now…where are all the kittens?”

I’ve heard it lamented that my generation “needs to know everything now,” as if that is a bad thing. Can you blame us? We are one of the first generations in history to even HAVE that ability! Knowledge at our fingertips, whenever we want it. Don’t know the answer to something? Look it up! (Not a week goes by that a particular coworker of mine and I DON’T say that phrase in the course of a conversation, which results in one of us turning to the interwebs and googling anything from definitions of words and origins of foods to that one guy’s name who starred in that one movie that one time).

I also think books are fantastic. When I was a kid, I was one of the kinds that stayed inside and read all of the time. At my wedding, my grandmother told a story of how, at the age of 4, I got upset at my grandfather for presuming I couldn’t read the comics section (“I can read them in my head!” I insisted).

The feel of a book in your hands, turning a crisp or dog-eared page. Smelling the ink and paper, flipping to the back to see just how many pages you have left. Taking the dust jacket off and feeling somehow cooler for having an unjacketed book (as if all of life’s mysteries could be contained within and only you know it).

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And books are the internet of the past! I guess that makes libraries like computers. 

Or browsers. 

Something like that.

The thing that the internet and books have in common, of course, is the access to knowledge they grant the user. New worlds, new word combinations, new facts, glimpses into how other people live…all of this new information provides insight into your own life, helps you relate to others.

I think you can love both the old and the new. It’s not a mutually exclusive love.

And that’s what this blog is all about! The mutually inclusive love of the old and the new.


These are exciting times! Great things are ahead!