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Home » Blog This

March 10, 2009

I'm From Away

Posted by Anna Bowen at 11:49 AM ET

Ok, so maybe Lisa's TV rehab blog has got me thinking about my own relationship to technology. I mean, sure, I don't own a TV and I don't even have a cell phone (gasp, how do you live?) but I would say on average my laptop becomes an extension of my body for probably about ten hours a day or more. I try to think that I balance my relationship to electronic devices with a healthy engagement with the natural world, when in fact for the last few years I have basically hibernated in front of the computer (ok, also books) all winter and then come out squinting into the growing season in a pretty remote location in Nova Scotia where I have a hard time understanding how anyone could lie to themselves and call the internet "high speed," and where clean water is still an issue. True Torontonians look at me with mouth agape. Where I work in Cape Breton, facebook is a bi-monthly event, cell phones are for snow storms, and movie night means going to Ralph's Dairy to pick up "The Pursuit of Happyness" again (please, no). It's a little manic, in the end.(It's also illegal to drive while chatting on your cellphone, a law I could do with more of here in Ontario.)

Although I was shocked to hear that my partner's students don't know how to find something in a book (Student: Where's the answer? TA: Look in your textbook. Student: Where? TA: Look in the index. Student: What's an index?) recently I have been really trying to remind my brain that when reading a book there is no "Find" or "Search" function. In the same vein, the NY Times just published a piece on the way that cellphone navigation might change the way we (er, you) think.

I try to tell myself that I no longer need to cling to these sticky binary oppositions between nature and culture; that neither has the upper hand, but function interdependently, that neither is pure. Recently I have had a renewed sense of the miraculous and the human in the city - my gawd, how are all these people so squished together and don't want to kill each other? Cities are amazing! But at the same time, when I need something for comfort in times of grief, myspace or facebook obituaries just don't cut it for me. I would much rather see things grow and die and compost in the natural world in order to get a deeper sense of WTF is going on.

More entries on: From the intern desk

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