According to the New York times, it’s fashionable to hate the phone (“Don’t Call Me, I Won’t Call You,” by Pamela Paul, NYT, March 28, 2011). I appreciate some of the anti-phone arguments. If a telemarketer rings you up at the dinner hour , it tends not to improve the evening. If you work as… Continue reading »
Archives for The Way We Live Now
Redesigns for Living
Welcome to 2011. A lot of people I know were happy to see the back of 2010. I know how they feel; I finished the year with what my doc called a “humdinger” of a case of pneumonia, which put me in the hospital for 4 days right after Thanksgiving and wiped me out for… Continue reading »
Hyperabundance and Scarcity, or Enough Is Enough
There’s a stack of publishers’ catalogs on my desk at work nearly a foot high. There are 5, 645 messages in my mail inbox. My family’s digital photo archives contain about 13,000 pictures–and my kids are only in elementary school. You don’t want to know how many scraps of paper I have on my desk… Continue reading »
Old Year, Old Biz, New Year, New Media
Happy New Year, everyone. Like a lot of people I know, I was not sorry to see the back of 2009, a year in which some very unpleasant things–personal, financial, global–occurred. There were good moments, too, which I try to remember to be grateful for–catastrophes narrowly avoided, for instance, and some fiction published. Even though… Continue reading »
Switch-Tasking Toward the Future
At the 2009 WebWise Conference on Museums and Libraries in the Digital Age, held here in D.C. last week, I collected a new term: switch-tasking. Definition? Instead of doing a number of things all at once–multitasking–you rotate among tasks. I haven’t figured out yet whether the difference is more semantic than substantive, but it’s worth… Continue reading »
