Now that I'll be crossing the pond to the British Isles, I thought it was appropiate to start a blog in english. The topics will be, well, whatever my restless brain cells come up with, hence the title. I had some trouble naming it, since I came up with this nice title in spanish but couldn´t find the right adjetive to convey entire meaning of the world inquieto. So I came up with some aproximation that also sounds funny.
My first contribution is actually very appropiate for the media, because is about out increasing dependence on the internet. Some may even call it an addiction. And maybe it is. This saturday morning was like any other. Lazy start, cup of coffee, maybe finish downloading an old chapter of a tv series I like to watch. And right around 26% of download it just died. I tried everything to reboot the router, nothing. A moment later my roomate, who just had woken up, came running down the stairs to check up on the router also, but he found out what the problem was. We had forgot to pay the internet bill. Major tragedy! It was 10 am in a Saturday morning and we didn´t have a working internet connection! What were we going to do?
But he moved fast, he was truly anxious about it. He managed to get our other roomate to go and pay the bill as soon as he could, and at some point there we were, sitting infront of a blue box waiting for the flashing orange light to turn green and steady. In the mean time, we talked about how it would be to spend a whole weekend without internet. We are not only using it as a source of information, but is our main entertainment. We have become so dependent of having everything right at hand, to be able to google anything at the slightest doubt we get or need of information, that we no longer can handle not knowing something for more than 5 minutes. The same with not knowing what our friends are up to every day. Well, I personally think it's kind of absurd to be posting on facebook where you are at any given time. I personally don´t care at all if any of my fb friends are getting a hair cut, buying toilet paper or waiting in line at the bank. That is simply oversharing, and only a potential kidnapper could possibly be interested in knowing when you check in your job, or a bar or boyfriend's place. The same goes with food. Some people like to post everythig they eat, as if they expected approval on their diet. I have been guilty of that myself, but in my defense, it was usually exotic food, or specially good one. So, if i ever end up eating stuffed marmot in the mongolian plains, I will definitely post it on facebook, be warned!
Ok, I drifted. The bottom line is that we are completely plugged. So much that we sometimes interact more with people online than in real life. We may be very well informed about what is happening in Lybia, but we may not know what is going on in our own neighborhood, just because is not on youtube. That is kind of scary, and reminds me of a science fiction novel called Hyperion by Dan Simmons that pictures a future where people had the connection to internet implanted in their brains. So, before we get to that point, maybe we should unplug ourselves more often.
Meanwhile, my download is done and I'm off to watch a video :P
