Sorry for posting this late. As I said on Friday, playing the father role this weekend.
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If I woke up to find myself in the 19th century, I think I'd have to get my Scotch-Irish-German-English butt to Boston as soon as possible and enlist on a merchant ship bound for anywhere but here. I am at best ambivalent towards our modern digital age. While I am certainly not a fan of that whole "colonialism" and "civilize the savages" thing, to imagine being able to hop on a ship and in a mere matter of several months later arrive at an exotic place that few other "people" (well, besides the indigineous folk, let's call 'em all Indians because it's easier to remember that way) have ever set foot on would be amazing.
The world certainly seemed like a much bigger place then. Every new communications and travel technology has been denounced in its time for destroying space: the telegraph, the train, radio, telephones, cars, airplanes. television, internet, cell phones, and so on. Now every destination in the world is reachable in less than 48 hours and available in a matter of seconds (depending on your broadband speed) via CNN and wikipedia and twitter. And yet as close as modern technologies have brought us in the last two hundred and some odd years, the world's people seems just as far apart as ever.
Funny how some things never change. And not in the ha ha way.
my laptop doesn't give me a blanket full of syphilis, though.
ReplyDeletedid that make any sense? i am obviously still very sick...
True, but the internet does put you in contact with more "settlers" who are willing to share their "gifts" in more intimate ways. At least the syphilis blanket stays around to cuddle when you're descending into the Poe-like throes of madness instead of running off for an "early meeting tomorrow morning" :P
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