life beyond the screen

Kevin Kelly writes, “Even the tiniest disposable item with a bar code shares a thin sliver of our collective mind.” Sharing in the increasing webness of things surrounding us is essential part of functioning in our digital society. If you have hung out on the cusp of technological adoption, waiting for the latest and most advanced devices to drop, you know how technology can monopolize our time and question any non-technological solution as inferior or important. The Internet is our exotic travel destination, a portal to bossy technologies.

Here’s the choice you have: You can grab the bullhorn of digital culture and plug into the belly of the machine or we can keep the cornucopia of technology at arm’s length to more easily remember who we are apart from it.

Somewhere there’s a balance between chasing the latest fad (simply because it is new) and becoming irrelevant to the conversation (because we choose to ignore transitions, remaining in our comfort zone). These extremes are the simplistic ditches we can fall into, when we would rather not have to regularly think hard and deal with uncertainty…and they will remain the temptations of anyone involved in the process of journalism.

As you decide where to place yourself in the technological embrace, remember there’s life beyond the screen.

Stephen Goforth