Last night, after seven plus hours of hunching over my computer in frustration, trying to figure out why my blog wasn’t working like it was supposed to, I came very close to just unplugging from everything – Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, Gmail and any other form of cyber social networking. I was so annoyed and irritated with it all, that I even contemplated giving up my Droid for a simple phone that only receives phone calls. But, because I promised someone that I’d take care of their social media marketing needs, I realized that there was no way I could unplug from technology and go off the grid. That rustic-cabin-with-no-electricity-Walden-experience would never happen for me. No, I am destined instead, to take the road more travelled. (Yes, I’m mixing metaphors - get used to it.) Once I get a handle on all the nuances of Twitter and Blogger, I will jump off the deep end into the intricacies of Facebook.
That being said, I am going to take a moment, as I am poised on a metaphorical ledge, to mourn the days gone by, when people communicated face to face, or wrote epistolary letters to far off loved ones, perhaps enclosing a snapshot or two of the family. Now, everything is in an email, or a text, or on a computer screen. All but gone are the faded, handwritten declarations of love from great-grandpa, carefully tied up with ribbon, stored in great-grandma’s cedar-lined hope chest. In the future, those trying to track their ancestry to learn of the loves, lives, hopes, dreams, sorrows and joys of their loved ones long gone, will have to resort to cyberspace research. Is anybody out there saving their emails, I wonder, realizing that possibly the only documentation of their personal legacy is contained solely in an “inbox”? Probably not.
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