By Emily Rosen
ERosen424@aol.com
www.emilyrosen424.com
iTunes – iPhones – iPods – iPads … Eye yi yi yi! Kindle – Kindle Touch – Kindle Keyboard – Kindle Fire – The Nook – The all-new Nook – the Droid – touch pads – swipe pads – 3G – 4G – apps – more apps – Xbox – Wii and blogs, blogs, blogs … OMG! There’s a whole new language sprouting up all around me. HELP! I feel like I’m standing at a train station, and the express has just whizzed by me – and oops! That was my train and I missed it.
On a scale of 1 to 10 regarding cyberspace, I’ve slid to about a 5. Twenty-six years ago, I was cutting edge, the only person I knew who owned, and could use a computer, my trusty 1985 Mac, full price about $6,000. I could not even carry on a dinner conversation about my computer because there was no one who could talk the language. I probably should have kept it. Someone on eBay could be looking for it.
Today, I am working with Windows XP on my flat screen desk computer – probably the eighth one I have owned, exclusive of my husband’s laptop. I love my mouse. As I stare at it, I feel like I’m looking at the tail of a Dinosaur. It’s two years old. People around me are swiping and pad-touching and sending me email messages from Blackberries and iPhones and text messages about sunsets, about walks with their dogs and urging me to find them on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.
Every two weeks or so, I check on LinkedIn and find only people who want to sell me their wares or who complain about the sorry state of Journalism today. I haven’t checked my Twitter account for two years. And when I go to my Facebook page, I find a bunch of people I don’t even know, showing me pictures of their pet poodles in costume or their adorable grandkids, or their Harley Davidson’s. Some of them exhort me to check their YouTube creations, where I am urged to engage in a more spiritual life, to love my neighbors and, more important, to love myself (I do, I do!).
Where is this all going? I know we are only on the cusp now. I read The Futurist. I follow some of the work of Ray Kurzweil – Google him!
(Google is happiness!) – a scientist, futurist, who sees humans living for many hundreds of years by 2029, encased in myriad robotic body parts. Robotic genitalia? Lord – take that image off my radar screen!
Ah, but I’ve wandered afar. I intended to make this a treatise on eBooks. It looks like the new Kindle can do everything except make pizzas, and I am about to succumb. If you can’t fight ‘em, join ‘em, but I’ll never catch that train.
