Living in the future

I’m slow to dive into new technology unless and until I can see how I might find it useful. It took me until the late ’90s to buy a CD player, although I started downloading MP3s as soon as the first version of iTunes came out. Facebook? It took me until earlier this year to sign up, and then mostly because a friend and I have been playing Scrabble more or less continuously since 1998 or so and Facebook gives us an opportunity to have a game or two going at any given moment. (Okay, that’s not exactly “useful,” and Facebook has come in handy in a few other ways since then, but really, it’s all about the Scrabble.) I don’t dig Digg, Delicious isn’t quite to my taste, and I don’t see the point of keeping all my documents online when the whole point of taking my laptop to the coffee shop around the corner is to get away from the temptations of the Internet.

On the other hand, no one will ever accuse me of being a Luddite. As I noted in a previous post, I qualify as an early Internet adopter, and I’m a member of what’s arguably the oldest online community. Twitter grabbed me as soon as I learned about it, although I don’t use it the same way others might. I watch more TV, thanks to Netflix and Hulu, than I ever did before I cancelled my cable subscription. Digital photography has changed my life. I’m no Stephen Fry, but sometimes I feel like I’m wired six ways to Sunday — this evening, for example, one of my friends back in Boston said on Twitter that she and her husband were on her way to see Mike Doughty play at Regattabar in Cambridge, and a bit later, another friend posted to Facebook that he, too, was headed to the same show. And so I told him to find her and tell her I said hi, and she just informed me that the three of them — whom I don’t think have seen each other since my moving-away party 10 years ago — had drinks together after the show. (And how cool is that? And how much do I wish I’d been there, both for the drinks and for the music beforehand?)

I had a conversation earlier in the day with a friend who is rapidly becoming a social media guru of sorts. We were nattering on at each other about what she calls “communication 2.0″ — Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Yammer, wikis, blogs, bla bla — and about the strong points of each one. I said something about being able to do things we weren’t able to imagine as recently as five years ago, and she replied that the people we were five years ago would have found our conversation utterly incomprehensible. (“What’s a Ning?”) Even though I still use fountain pens and kind of miss printing in a darkroom, I have to say: the future’s not half bad.

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