The Skeeter Daddle Diaries

I can’t figure out whether we were bored BEFORE the internet and smart phones …. or whether they MADE us bored.  Ruined our concentration, shot our attention spans full of holes, filled every waking minute with text messages, snippets of celebrity gossip, news flashes and crawler messages on the bottom of our brains’ screens.

We check our phone messages every 3 minutes (if we’re older than 40) or every 15 seconds (if we’re under 40).  The older crowd checks e-mail 20 times a day.  If you still get a newspaper, you got most of the articles from newsfeeds on your computer anywhere from a few hours ago to a full day.  It isn’t ‘news’ you get in a newspaper these days.  Everyone’s got a cellphone now and by god, they paid for it and they plan to use it — as often as humanly possible, whether they’re driving in the freeway passing lane or taking a whiz in the airport urinal.  They’re connected, linked up, every waking hour of every day, I guess forever until the day they die or their phone plan expires.

It’s hard to believe this has happened, not just in our lifetime, but in the last decade.  If we thought the Rat Race was hard, well, the digital rats are on steroids, cranked on meth and just a little too busy to slow down to consider what’s happened in the last few years.  Too busy for sure to read a book or write a letter or just disconnect from the Hive half an hour.  Watch a 15 year old and see the Future — it’s here!  30 minutes ago.  17 tweets.

Even on the South End there’s no escaping the tsunami of this incessant incoming information.  At least until the winter storms.  For those 6 of us who refuse to own a cellphone.  Or buy a generator.  Or even go down to the Diner to keep abreast of the breaking gossip.  In a few days we’ll try to catch back up.  Course, by then the world will have accelerated another few miles per second.  And we’ll be those objects in your rearview that aren’t anywhere near as close as they appear.  Best of luck when you get where you’re in such a hurry to get.  You got a second or two, send us a postcard.  We still get mail….

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