{"id":6239,"date":"2011-07-04T07:04:53","date_gmt":"2011-07-04T14:04:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alephnaught.com\/Blog\/?p=6239"},"modified":"2011-07-31T10:54:03","modified_gmt":"2011-07-31T17:54:03","slug":"fifty-two-years-technology-social-media-and-me-and-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alephnaught.com\/Blog\/2011\/07\/04\/fifty-two-years-technology-social-media-and-me-and-you\/","title":{"rendered":"Fifty-two years: Technology, social media, and me (and you)"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I turned 52 today; I’ve seen over a half century of some of the most amazing changes in our world.<\/p>\n

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\"Aviva<\/a>

Red velvet cake with butter cream icing - yummy!<\/p><\/div>\n

I remember when we started locking our outside doors … when I was 6. Milk and potato chips were delivered to our basement door every week. There was no voice mail or answering machines or call waiting – if you weren’t there when the phone rang, you didn’t know you’d missed anything, and you wouldn’t think to interrupt a phone call unless it was an emergency. And we drank Coca-Cola – not Diet Coke or Coke Classic, there was only Coca-Cola, “and we liked it like that.”<\/p>\n

I remember when a backhoe arrived to dig a slot in our front yard for city water – we had well water until I was a teenager, and it just worked, it tasted fine (it was pretty much all we knew after all) and we didn’t get sick from it. City water tasted a little strange but we also didn’t get sick from that; of course we had to pay a fee for that “improved” water (and associated sewer service – we had a septic tank until then). I’m reminded of the wonderful Lewis Black monologue on milk and water<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Take advantage of the time-shifting ability of technology<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

I remember when we built our first home computer as a teenager; when I was 6, my dad took me to a CDC installation in Rockville, MD; he had the teletype print out various ASCII art, including a nude woman sitting on a stool – that one got him in trouble with my mom, but they let me keep it.\u00c2\u00a0 I visited that site again while I was in college during a co-op position with a small consulting firm to convert an old magnetic tape to a more modern format – that was the only site on the eastern seaboard that had an old enough OS running to read the tape (shades of Word V. 2). And I remember going online with CompuServe on my Atari ST, meeting people and working out problems together. And today I put a computer much more powerful than that first one my dad and I built into my pocket, and it’s connected to the world.<\/p>\n

When I was young, the world was small – it was a big deal to drive into Washington, D.C. from our home outside Vienna, VA, a trip that could take 30 minutes. I remember flying to Saudi Arabia in 1984 for 3 months of work, and realizing how insular my life had been up to that time; on the way out I stopped in Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and learned that there’s a lot of cultural choice out there (and that flight delays can wreak havoc on connecting flights).<\/p>\n

Now, the world is flatter and smaller than it’s ever been – I remember in the ’80s emailing with a fellow who was interested in some customizations a friend in London and I (I was in Chicago) were doing to Lucid Emacs. At the end of his email, he asked me to wish him luck. I checked his domain, he was from the old Soviet Union and this was the first day of the attempted coup against Gorbachev. I wished him luck (and checked in with him after the coup failed), and realized that I’d found a way to connect with people all over the world, and didn’t have to fly to do it.\u00c2\u00a0 I now work daily with people who live in Chennai, India, and I have friends in Amsterdam that I made during many, many trips to that city for work.<\/p>\n

Technology has made us more available to each other, and has made us available to people who, just two decades ago, we never would have met. I think this is amazing.<\/p>\n

Folks complain about social media taking up too much time and being irrelevant – I disagree on both counts.<\/p>\n

And people decry technology as stepping into our lives too much – if you feel this way, then you are allowing it.<\/p>\n

Turn stuff off. Go see a movie. Hit the beach and wade up to your waist. Take time out to connect with, and in, the physical world. For me, I tweet less on the weekend so I can spend more time with my spouse and dogs. I spend a lot of my own computer time in between other things, or very early in the morning when I’m the only mouse in the house.<\/p>\n

Use social media to connect with people you like or need, especially folks that live too far away to visit regularly. My son and I follow each other on Twitter, for example, and my sister and I watch each others walls on Facebook. I made a friend on Twitter (well, I feel I’ve made many friends on Twitter) who I’ve never met who lived in Tucson and now lives in the great northwest (rain much?:-)); I may never meet her in person but I’ve at least had the pleasure of knowing her – 30 years ago it’s unlikely we’d have met. Social media provides an improved way for me to keep up with the people I’ve met all over the world.<\/p>\n

Don’t be rude – technology may appear to give us a bye on interrupting others, but it does not. If you must take a call during a conversation, step back and make it brief. Give real life interactions preference over online interactions; you can’t time-shift real life.<\/p>\n

Take advantage of the time-shifting ability of technology – you can tweet a response in the morning and the other person will get it, leave a wall post and check later to see the response. Unless you’re trying to close a business deal, the message can probably wait a few hours (hey, I remember when we wrote those things called letters….).<\/p>\n

And one more thing – for those of you too young to remember these changes, keep in mind that some of us have a passion for keeping up with the swirling changes in our culture and tools; don’t automatically assume that someone with grey hair doesn’t “get it.” Our connection with our past can provide a path to our future, a way to bring people along to new ways of working and thinking.<\/p>\n

Ars longa, vita brevis – make sure to use the time you have on this mortal coil in ways that make you as happy as you can be.<\/p>\n

And a big thank you to all the kind birthday messages from my friends all over the world!<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\nTranslate<\/span><\/a>\"\"\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I turned 52 today; I’ve seen over a half century of some of the most amazing changes in our world. I remember when we started locking our outside doors … when I was 6. Milk and potato chips were delivered to our basement door every week. There was no voice mail or answering machines or […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[4,8,466],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6239","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer","category-personal","category-social-networking-computer"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t