Anyway, to all those people who maintain that the internet is instantaneous, I give them my email, at yahoo.com. I use this new, even-more-instantaneous service that they made me sign up to about a year ago. It's all right at home, but when I compose an email on a work computer (I do it at lunch break, okay?) things are different. Let's say I start my email with seven words or so: I type the words in, and five minutes later, they'll appear on the screen. By that time, I'll have been able to:
- consider my spelling
- reconsider whatever I'm talking about, or arguing
- walk around the office and perform an old-fashioned, non-instantaneous (though faster) form of communication, such as talking
- make some coffee
- decide to delete the whole email and write something completely different.
Chances are, by the time I've finally typed up the email (some 20 words later) and sent it off, I'll have used up my whole lunch break.
The internet is so instantaneous! It's almost as instantaneous as tectonic plate shift!
2 comments:
Instantaneousness is all comparative. I remember when I had me ol' computer and I used to wait for a page like Google to upload. I'd sit around watching it for twenty minutes, then I'd go away and have dinner and then come back and sit around for another half hour and watch it. maybe it would upload and maybe it wouldn't.
We had a very slow computer but I thought this was normal.
It was faster than Aussie Post.
It is like thinking about a whole lot of cavemen standing around a fire thinking "What an amazingly modern discovery! What a peculiar name you've given it "fire"! Whatcha gonna call the next one - a wheel?"
Ah yes, similar experiences with mine, a most laborious experience it was waiting for a page to load. And I would, three quarters of the time, sit there, stupidly goggling at the screen and wait for it to finish it's work.
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