Having developed blackberry-forearm, I'm trying to lay off such heavy use of it. This is giving me fits. The other night the singer who did most of the music for Happythankyoumoreplease was performing at a preview-screening (the best parts of which have really sort of clung to me, much more than I expected - Hale's and Schreiber's climactic lines especially of course) and I wanted to look her up, but refrained. This got me thinking about how the degree to which the internet and its immediate availability have changed life probably cannot be overstated. One "price" of this convenience being the democratization of knowledge... it's so cheap now. I no longer have to network/research to find an ornithologist to recall or find out the name of the particular kind of bird whose call I liked as a child. That's good, mostly, I guess, aside from the minor matter of the whole mutual alienation/fracturing of society thing. I first thought about this a lot in the late 90s in the context of e-commerce as it started taking off... I remember thinking, "Soon it will not be all that special to have a Ron Jon [holla Nate] or Black Dog t-shirt." So the wide availability of information, services and products has relatively inflated the value of two particular things that I've been thinking about:
(1) authenticity in experience. As long as people are people, many of them will want ways to establish their relative status. Hence eg the shrill desperate hysteria of reviewers on yelp (I don't exempt myself from this) - the whole "you may have a sous-vide machine and be able to *replicate* his stuff, but *I've* actually BEEN to Alinea" thing. Maybe anyone can get a Black Dog shirt, but I am going to make dang sure everyone knows I've actually BEEN there (and, preferably, long before you ever had). etc.
(2) what can't (yet) be learned or known via google. What does that person think of me? Does this person *really* love me? (which reminded me of maybe the best exploration of this I've ever experienced, the old Australian movie "Proof") Also everyone cites 9/11 and the economy but I think what I'm talking about is at least as much responsible for the heightened 'secular' interest in spiritual matters and wanting to know such unknowables, including also the future... in NY anyway, going to psychics has long since passed not only the "socially acceptable" but the "fashionable" line and shows no signs of slowing its further progress. :/

I'm sure lots of other people have made these kinds of observations, possibly ad nauseam, before me, and I assume I'm being very Jean Tisdale, but have been thinking about this a lot this wkd for some reason.

So probably going to "have" to get iPad 2, but refuse to have more than 1 device, so will have to rig it for phone. I better be able to talk on it via wireless-bluetooth; I'm not holding that thing up to my face.

And of course I am typing this entire rant on blackberry... :/