I was telling RB earlier this week how my t-mobile sidekick has put a few new wrinkles in how I use the net. I mean, not just in the obvious ways, like how I can post from the road or get email anyplace/where. But in subtle ways too.
The sidekick changes how I feel, how I move, how I lie down, how I go to sleep--and also how I travel online and where I go. One example: Most nights instead of picking up a book in bed, I now pick up my sidekick.
It's important to me that I hold the sidekick with two hands, just like a book, that I lean back on my pillows, pull the covers up, keep the sidekick in front of my face, about the same distance away from my eyes as a book, and that on more than one occasion I've stumbled around the next morning only to find the sidekick under the bed, just where my books used to land after having fallen fast asleep with them in hand.
Now I curl up with my favorite blogs just as I once did my favorite novel or latest selfish-help book.
So I'm telling him this, and says: "The Web as the endless book."
As usual, I start thinking of what that means to me, and I think yes! Through my sidekick, through anything small and convenient and transportable enough to read and digest in page-by-page fasion with two hands. yes.
Picking up the net when I pick up my sidekick is like picking up the endless book.
But why? Is it the sidekick specifically? Is it me? Is it my level of familiarity with the net? Is it even a diagnosable condition at all?
I don't know, but I will tell you my particular symptoms:
When I reach through my laptop window and touch the net, I'm having conversations, I'm writing with abandon, I'm commenting, I'm laughing, I'm linking to and fro. This is where I really engage.
When I'm in desktop mode, I'm working. I'm searching google. I'm researching, I'm printing, and in between I'm posting, but mostly I search there.
When I approach the net from my sidekick, it is my endless book.
It's my single binding with pages penned by a hundred of my favorite authors, whose stories are separate and interrelated all at once.
So what does all of this mean?
The net is Bi-Polar. It is a tragedy and comedy all at once; it's dark and it's light, fiction and non-fiction all at once. It's everything that has ever been written and nothing all at the same time. It is poetry and prose at once, elevating and degrading, uplifting and depressing. The net is as much about splitting as it is joining.
And if the net is an agreement, it is as much about disorder as it is protocol. It is as much about the schizophrenia of me, myself, and I (and him and her and them and us) as it is about the handshake with the network. It's as much about how you arrive as what you do there, and as much about what you do after you've been as it is what you did while you were there.
Some thoughts for sleeptime reading... the sidekick is charged--see ya upstairs.
