The Final Installment of the 2012 Summer Blather Series

The slow unwitting descent into my digital coffin is a sentence that cries out to be corrected. Or at least understood within the nuances of the digital medium itself. Because really, it wasn't slow. By digiweb standards the fourteen or so years it has taken me from the moment I put my digits to keyboard in employ of my very first digital manipulation software to the last Instagram I tweeted is an eternity. And truth be told, I lucidly pursued the digital medium with a sort of single minded fervor for the last decade. I can even admit that the whole time I had a pretty good idea of what I was getting myself into. The loss of privacy, both in terms of the tangible external as well as the personal conceptual was not something I hadn't foreseen to a degree. I knew what I was doing would be recorded forever and I looked to it as a sort of personal diary that anyone could read at any moment, and specifically, at some point, that "anyone" became my son. I was even prepared for the slight shifts in perception that might occur with a sort of constantly running public commentary. I had planned on it, even, hoping that my powers of observation, both literary and visually, might be enhanced; that I might learn to pay attention more; keep my eyes and ears open for those snippets of happenstance I could turn into a plausible web log. I created a whole mini-network of related portals: an art and writing blog for a kind of running, chaptered journal of projects, the portfolio-ish blog for more one-time ideas, a community video blog for friendly musical dalliances, a Tumblr where I collect "inspirational" images, this very blog to help stoke my passion for surfing, a LinkedIn account and a Facebook account where I could carefully cultivate my online personality, two separate Vimeo accounts to showcase all the video work I do, countless friends and family fantasy sports leagues I have interacted through, a business website that even has a blog attached to that to update recent projects and a website umbrella sort of entity thing to list each one in case anyone ever wanted it all under one roof. And now, lately, I've started a Twitter account that I still can't wrap my brain around, but likely will, and an Instagram page that has easily become something of an obsession. And throughout all this, I knew what I was getting into. I knew I'd be accepting the inevitable fate of our generation and those generations to come of full inter-connected chuminess. I bowed to the realization that there is little that will halt the march toward total information surrender. I was prepared, I thought, for everything. But not quite. What I wasn't prepared for, that is, what I'm not prepared for, as it hits me with successive waves of mental nausea, is how all this really has changed my perception, not the observational sort interacting with the world around me in a literary and engaged way, but my perception of time and my existence in it. It is an existential thing, perception of time. For now, as I zip around on my bicycle, taking my son to school, running errands, I stop and check my email. Now as I drive out to the beach for a surf, or to pick up groceries, I glance at my phone to see if I've got any texts. Now, with the world happening all around me in big bold colors, loud crashes and pungent smells, somehow now I wonder if I'm missing something else happening online or elsewhere. I wonder if such and such a thing I just saw would translate from this world here, into that world there quickly enough. And frankly, I think I am subconsciously starting to consider that world there to be the primary one. The world of universal, inclusive communication has started to become the real world. And this world here, the old "real" world, with its slow moving time frames, its increasingly hampered and disjointed series of communicated events, is starting to move too slow. I'm not getting enough, fast enough. That red building isn't telling me enough. That barking dog isn't saying enough to me. That poopy smell isn't bequeathing me enough current events. I need to know more, and faster. I need to stay tuned in. I need constant updates and I need to be able to comment on them, not these. And this might very well change my understanding of life and existence and what it means to be. The digiweb world is reaching out through my phone and my computer and even my car and starting to alter my perceptions of the non-digiweb world, embedding itself there in the process. An incredible thing, this.  An incredible thing that no matter how cognizant I am of it happening, I am not cognizant enough.