Correspondence in the Digital Age

I spend all day instant messaging, "chatting" and emailing people whom I left out east.

I get my news from race & pop culture blogs daily, between the hours of 7am when i get up because my body won't let me sleep any later than that and 10:45am when I have to be at work.

Once at work I instant message my co-workers, the owner and other people related to the business for questions, troubleshooting or general "a dude just ran by with no pants on" types of conversations.

I have put certain friends on a ban from text messaging me because I only get 50 per month and some will text a whole conversation, or text just to say one word.

At work we rely on computers to keep track of our inventory, our register is a program on our computer and we have a excel document that lists every item we sell each day as a back up.

When I get home, I talk to friends in the same ways as I did all day, who live on the west coast and are in grad

school, my sister who is trapped in So-Cal and has classes until late in the day. I write my vox posts, write for myself and depend highly upon the keyboards of my lap top and my parent's computers to get me through all the words in my head, stress in my brain, and put it out onto the screen, recorded somewhere.

I have a confession: I am too dependent on technology. In the last few months I have depended upon it to find out if a loved one was alive, I have killed the disk drive in my lap top because I used it too much for work. I have lost my ipod and been left with out an alternative means of travel music as I no longer have simple cds, tapes or devices to play them in (ipod was found nearly 2 months later). Today I managed to loose an entire data file at work and had to redo nearly 200 entries using a back up that was made in August of last year. I have been phoned by my boyfriends parents because he didn't show up for a family function he had intended to attend and neither they nor I knew what was going on beacuse no one could get a hold of him for a few days. To be truthful, he has horrible signal and was working an an important and timely project all day.

The frustration of not knowing where he was, or being able to get a hold of him, for me was impacted by the loss of that data file. It was impacted by a situation a few months ago, nearly a year, where people I have almost daily correspondence with were unreachable for over a week. Several people (and i wrote a private post about this when I was really and truly frustrated a few weeks ago that I then deleted whence I knew what was going on) have been M.I.A. for a few months, the only evidence that they were alive was the "Last Log In" tally on their various web profiles.

And here I now am, writing about this as we speak, on a computer, to be posted on the web, while chatting with people who are away, at work and so on, wondering when I, when we, got to be this way.

The answer is really that we have no choice. I never write letters to anyone anymore. What for when I can email, text, call, or leave them a message somewhere. I did for a while write with an actual pen, and actual paper, those stories, feelings and moments I have wanted to give extra privacy to, extra work to before publishing them elsewhere, but have gotten out of that flow.

Today however, made me truly question what was going on. There is no way to get away from it,  but perhaps it means I need a different grasp of reality. Perhaps I should get a piece of paper and write someone. I can't avoid the use of the computer at work, I can't avoid the phone calls, unless I get a carrier pigeon or two. But I could start reading the newspaper. I can back up every file I can. And, I can hate this dependency all I want, but obviously, there's nothing I can do about the fact that this is just how it is. I'm not really advocating that we go back to horse drawn carriage messenger services, but perhaps I can get over the instant gratification of typing "www.___________.com" and getting exactly what I want at my fingertips.