Connectivity

I've been reading, at the suggestion of Barrioboy, The Color of a Dog Running Away, by Richard Gwyn. It's set in Barcelona in the 1990s, an era pre-cell phone, pre-laptop, pre-connectivity; and the lives of its characters are as different from my life today as the lives of people in the 1890s or the 1490s. They have large swathes of solitude, these characters from the 1990s; they only engage with people face-to-face; and they are not interrupted, distracted, or delighted by email, text messages, phone calls, or comments from websites like this one.

Take this paragraph for example: "I had nearly finished the wine and was feeling sleepy. The hot afternoon air was dusty and rancid. I watched a lizard scuttle along the veranda wall. A city lizard on a dizzy city parapet. It stopped and blinked at me, watching and not watching. The lizard had been blinking in the sun, watching and not watching, waiting and not waiting, for the past twenty million years" (33).

Human characters, written or not written, have been sitting around gazing at lizards for the past twenty million years. Only now I think that has stopped.

That paragraph now would read as follows: I had nearly finished the wine and was feeling sleepy. I checked Blip to see if I had any comments. I had three, two of which screamed for a response, so I responded to them. One came from someone I'd never heard from before who just subscribed to my journal, so I checked his journal, his "About," and his last ten Blips, and was interested. I subscribed to his journal and wrote comments on his last three Blips. Then I checked my email. Three messages, one a link to a Youtube, so I watched that one and two related ones. The second message was a Facebook notification, so I quickly reviewed the status reports on my home page. The third email needed an answer, so....

No gazing at lizards blinking in the sun.

I spend more time connected and engaged with people I don't see than with people I do. And so the time of real solitude has disappeared from my life. I am often alone. Until this decade, that meant: not connected with anything but my own thoughts and experiences in the moment. But now there are unseen others who might reach out at any moment with a compliment, expectation, request, or question. If I take a walk, I have my cell phone in my pocket. I am constantly monitoring, and deciding whether to respond, and if so whether now or later, to ribbons of connection with people I don't see, perhaps have never met, people whose real names I might not even know. 

I'm not judging this. I'm just observing that I am seldom NOT open to interruption, to distraction, to occupying my mind with imagining the thoughts and feelings of others with whom I'm connected, although perhaps I have never met them.

We live in a web of connectivity--like these tundra swans (all those white dots around the center of the picture) who fly and float together by the thousands. Thinking about connectivity, I went out to Sauvie Island this afternoon looking for images and finding many. I used iPhoto Antique for some of them, to bring out more contrast in the subtle winter landscapes. The extras (some antiqued and some not) are in a set on Flickr. I am wondering how other people feel about this enormous change in our way of life that has taken place since the 1990s.