Still Behind The Times...

My mom is in the process of joining the world of high-speed Internet.

She was one of her ISP's first customers, back in the day of dial-up. Remember those times? Remember waiting five or more minutes for a given webpage to load, and not minding, because there was no realistic alternative? Kind of similar to an even more ancient time, when you loaded your computer games off of cassettes. I still remember typing "CLOADM "WIZARD" on my dad's TRS-80 Color Computer...and then wandering upstairs to contemplate the universe for a while. Maybe have lunch, maybe a wee nap--and then the game will be all ready to go. That was back when "wait" wasn't a four-letter word.

The dial-up era is finally ending chez Maman. Once again, I'm ruefully reminded of Spider Robinson's assertion that we are all time travelers, moving into the future at a rate of one second per second. Not my Mom, oh, no. She's just gone from 1990 to 2010 in an eyeblink.

Most of us normal time travelers are so used to our high speed connections by now that it's difficult to imagine living without them. I for one would cheerfully take a sledgehammer to my computer rather than be forced to subsist on dial-up. Most of the things we take for granted now are impossible without high-speed. Take Internet commerce. With dial-up, any transaction is a race between checking out and timing out, a race you're pretty much always destined to lose. Or video: good luck with that. When bloody Facebook takes ten minutes to load a homepage, watching, say, the Olympics on your computer is the stuff of science fiction. The only thing your computer's any good for is email. Oh, and could you keep that text only, please? Somebody sent me a 1.5 MB file last month and my computer choked on it.

Now Mom's found herself in a bewildering world where anything, absolutely anything, is available on demand. I wouldn't blame her if she was a tad afraid. I would be. She'll be fine: she's one smart cookie, is my mom, and she didn't get this far in life without the ability to adapt. But the culture shock is likely to knock her around a bit.

I'm still well behind the times myself, obviously. Even though I have conceded defeat and become a person-who-has-a-cellphone, and even, good God, a-person-who-occasionally-texts-people...my resistance to 3G is holding firm. I will not go online with my cellphone. I absolutely will not.

One reason is that I already spend entirely too much time online at home. As somebody who knows all too well how addictive the Internet is, it behooves me to set limits, and that's the big one. Surf at home, and only at home. If I start going online anywhere just because I can, I may never go offline. And if that happens, please, somebody, shoot me in the head.

That resistance keeps me well back of the pack, and believe me, I'm content to be.

I love my iPod, don't get me wrong. It's a third-generation nano, "only" 8 GB, and I've almost filled it up with music. Just music--my model is too old for video, and that's fine by me: I don't know why anyone would willing watch anything on a three-inch screen. Aren't televisions getting bigger and bigger, to the point now where 20"--the old living room standard, at one point--is the smallest you can usually find to buy?

Portability, you say in a tone that suggests I just asked you what 2 plus 2 equals. To which I say, someday somebody's going to invent the iPrivy, a little portable toilet that you can affix to your backside anywhere you go. Think of the benefits! No more suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous bowel pressure: you can drop while you shop and pee where you be.

It's kind of weird: here we are, the height of technological civilization, but we're reverting to our nomadic roots, hunting information and gathering entertainment (and, incidentally, increasingly unable to tell the difference between the two). Things we used to enjoy seeing and doing at home must now be brought on the road.

I'm a homebody. Home is where the heart is, my home is my castle, and the best part of my castle, for me, is the moat, which I would stock with alligators if municipal bylaws permitted. This makes me an oddity. Whereas most people seem interested in taking all the comforts of home with them wherever they go, I'm more interested in bringing the world in. That, I can do on my time on on my terms.

Just like me, my mom will be catching up on her time and on her terms, picking and choosing from the myriad of options available. Some look mighty appetizing, and some look repulsive, and maybe that's the whole idea here. One man's meat is another man's poison, as they say....