Toronto Woolgathering...

I've been sitting here, sipping my coffee and woolgathering.
Last night I'd been putting my new modem through its paces - downloading, playing streaming audio, surfing like there was no tomorrow - and it's got me thinking about how different the world is becoming because of computers.

Here I am sitting in a little room in Mississauga and at some point in the near future my thoughts, as best as I can transcribe them, are right now being read by you. In another window, I am looking at the traffic conditions along the QEW. I am listening to a radio station being broadcast from San Diego. Silently in the background, my processer is crunching away on signals recieved from the deep recesses of space - looking for a pattern or glitch that would indicate something alive.

My eyes are over the Gardiner. My ears are in San Diego. Without a second thought I'm scanning into the deeps of time and space. My thoughts are now in the future with you.

With a click my eyes can be at a TGIFs in Texas. My ears can be listening to classical music broadcast from Toronto. My mind can absorb knowledge and opinions from any one of a billion plus pages.

Now there have been stacks of books written on what the future would look like, how computers will effect our lives. But as I sit here sipping my coffee, I'm not concerned so much with the wizbang factor of things. I'm not thinking about what neat little doodads and thingamawhats will do so much as I'm wondering what does this do to us as a people. What sense of self, what philosophies will derive from a world where the limitations of geography -and to some extent, the limits of time- no longer matter.

 

The limits of geography may prove to be transcendable in the present day, but the limits of time never will be. Ask anyone who's ever had regrets. We still can't go back.

Cris~

 

Going back - no.
But forward is entirely possible. By posting my thoughts to this forum, they are accessible to anyone for as long as this server remains up. A year from now a person can pop online and find out exactly what was going on in my head on December 31, 2000.

Now that sort of power we've always had through written language. It's just interesting the range we have to share it with nowadays. One hundred years ago, my thoughts would have been open to only those within my circle of friends. Today, they are there for millions to access should they choose to.

As for regrets - that is something that can only be reconciled by truly coming to terms with who you are and where you are. Once you accept that, the "might have beens" and "what ifs" become insignificant.

As the song goes, "Regrets, I had a few. But then again, too few to mention."