"Transmissions from the satellite heart..."

It's an album title. Special kudos from me for anyone who can name the band. But for some reason, I felt it was an apropos title for my first blog, my first transmission into cyberspace from my own personal Sputnik.

After exactly one day, this course (computers and the study of English, for anyone random that might be reading my blog--it's here for the entire world to see afterall, isn't it?) already has me thinking quite deeply, and about some rather uncomfortable subject matter. Technology, computers, the internet, a fundamental shift in the world and all society as we know it, the collapse of the once all-poweful United States--heavy, right? I guess that it's mostly Friedman's book that has given me food for thought, but it's also the questions and comments that have been generated in our class discussion and in our class blog. Truthfully, the majority of what I've read and been thinking about in connection to this class scares the crap out of me. I guess I'm a traditionalist and I'm not crazy about change, so I view the technological revolution just getting underway with more trepidation than excitement, more foreboding than hope. I've always been a "glass is half empty" kind of girl, and so I see technology being used by the government in a very negative, Big Brother way (wiretapping is the least of it, folks), or by al-Qaeda in a "Death to America" kind of way. Maybe because I just watched V for Vendetta the other night (highly recommended, by the way), or maybe because I watch the news once in a while.

Of course, I am not a complete cynic or the next Unabomber. There are many positive aspects of technology that even I acknowledge and embrace. I love being able to keep in touch with friends and relatives who are scattered throughout the country. I get to talk to them about both the important and mundane, see pictures of their homes, kids and pets. This kind of contact would be much more difficult without my computer. Probably impossible, actually, considering how lazy I am. Then there's one of my most favorite modern conveniences, the DVR. For someone who loves TV a little too much but is rarely home in the evening, the DVR is the perfect way to maintain that glamorous couch-potato lifestyle. And where would any of us be without our cell phones, particularly when driving a not-too-reliable car alone at night?

I guess what I'm getting at (rambling about?) is that I have pretty conflicted feelings about technology and how important it's become. In some ways I feel like it's just as isolating as it is connecting. Sure, you can have thousands of "friends" on your myspace account and innumerable people can comment on your blog, but how meaningful is that? Can it take the place of real, intimate, face-to-face conversation? I feel like people are so wrapped up in cyber communities of people they will never meet in real life that they don't bother to get out and interact with their actual community. Most people don't even know their neighbors.

Something that really struck me when I was reading Friedman's book was the story about the soldier who was killed in Iraq and his family's failed attempt to gain access to his Yahoo! email. The famliy wanted something of their son, in his own words, to remember him by. If we were still in the era of letter-writing, his personal letters and papers would have been given to his family, but with email, everything is just sort of "out there" in cyberspace. Friedman writes, "As we get rid of more and more paper and communicate through more and more digitzed formats, you better sort out before you die, and include in your will, to whom, if anyone, you want to leave your bits." And it just makes me think about how much what we know about history comes from the written record people have left behind, experiences that were captured in letters and journals. Will we have that in the future, the same kind of graphic, first-hand account of historical events? Will we know as much about the men dying in Iraq as we do about our grandfathers who fought in WWII? I suppose that there are those who would say that it doesn't really matter. Email or a paper letter doesn't make any difference, but I fear that we may be losing something without really realizing it. It's kind of sad.

I still really want an ipod, though ;-)