Cybercrone

credit: Flame Warriors by Mike Reed

While I was wandering around at the Farmers' Market today, my pocket rang. Fishing my cellphone out of my pocket, I was struck by the difference in my (and probably your) life today versus what it was in my grandmother's day. She would not have known what I meant by that first sentence, but you did. As I strolled around in the sunshine, I pondered how, if my grandmother were here how could I explain that difference?

When my husband and I moved up here, we both kept our cellphones, and he got a local number while I kept my Colorado one, to ensure that both our old and our new friends could contact us. We didn't get a landline. It's been almost two years now, and we haven't missed it at all. Our internet connection is wi-fi, and if I want to talk with someone I can't raise on my cell, I use iChat or Skype. We have two laptops and two desktops in our two-bedroom apartment, and we use them all.

The granny in the first picture is Mike Reed's idea of an old lady who incites people on the internet. Some of my fellow bloggers might qualify, but I try to keep it down. But I could if I wanted to! I am connected to a whole cyber world out there that is as real to me as my friends at the gym. I may see my fellow exercisers daily, but when Nancy at Life in the Second Half or Rae at Weather Vane stir up some cyber dust, I'm right there with them.

I blog daily, or almost daily, and if by some chance I leave the house without my cell, I feel totally disconnected. It just wasn't that long ago that I didn't mind walking around without being able to contact someone, or be contacted. How quickly all that changed. When I first thought about getting a cellphone, I remember hesitating, thinking how nice it was to be incommunicado, and now... well, that seems so last century.

When I used to travel internationally for my old job, I would often head to the internet cafe in China, Vietnam, or Thailand if I didn't have connectivity in my hotel room. As the years passed, we chose only to stay in places that offered wi-fi in the room, so we didn't need to go out to connect. Little by little, I found that my entire existence moved from the novelty to the necessity of being connected.

Nowadays I feel a sense of superiority when I see people sitting on the bus reading their twitter accounts, because I don't use that. I also don't use my cellphone to text or to connect to the internet. It's partly because I am feeling so connected now that I don't feel the need. But looking back at where I've come from, it seems possible that I could go down that road someday.  I've got a Facebook page, a cellphone, two computers (one portable), two blogs, and a website.

Just for fun, in re-reading that last paragraph, I wondered how much of it Granny would have understood, and how I would have described it to her. Pardon me for a minute while I do a little yoga.

:-)