online

I enjoyed handing the mic to Cindy last week. She enjoyed writing her words and then reading your responses.

The last several days has seen one of those stretches where time seemed to fall from the sky with only slightly more abundance than snow in Southern California. Yet despite the chaos of our schedule, Cindy did read every comment and every email. Alas, she has not yet had the time to answer more than a few and requested one more day here to say good-bye.

Of course, my love. She’s all yours…

“Coming together is a beginning;
Keeping together is progress;
Working together is success.”
~ Anonymous

After Mia and Max each got their turn, I knew my day at Writer Dad was coming. I didn’t know what Sean had in mind, but I was glad when he handed me the keyboard as I wasn’t really looking forward to my video interview… at least not yet. For the last seven months I’ve sat beside him as he’s read every post to me out loud before it went to publish.

It felt wonderful to be on the other side of the dashboard.

The virtual world is new to me. After observing it from an arm’s length over the last half year or so, I can confidently say it is teeming with life, constancy and an infinite number of possibilities and potential. I love the simple canvas that Sean has created to take day to day communication and turn it into a time capsule of who we are and how we grow at this moment in our lives.

As we look inward, and work outward in a unified direction, we create a forum woven with words in space and time to fill our life with substance and purpose. I am grateful for the inspiration, good cheer, and constructive thoughts that everyone has shared so willingly.

I mostly just wanted to say thank you to everyone who took the time to send me their thoughts. I truly, truly appreciate them. I will answer all your wonderful comments and emails by the end of this weekend.

Cindy

Swallowing Without Chewing

Yesterday, Vered from Momgrind made a comment that got me thinking. Of course, that’s not hard. The wind whistling past my ear will detour my thoughts, as long as I think it might be saying something different than it did the day before.

But if something’s bouncing about my brain without much intention of leaving, than I have to believe that there’s something there worth considering, and Vered’s comment was rattling around for a while.

She mentioned that it’s pretty natural to scan articles while reading online.

She couldn’t be more right.

When I first started doing a lot of online reading, I allowed my eyes to float over every set of syllables. Now, I swallow them as quickly as I can, as if they were the last hot waffles coming from a kitchen that’s closing in five minutes.

I can’t imagine reading a book this way.

Can you?

Really?

For me, it’s day and night. A book isn’t something to race through, it’s a first date; slow and thoughtful and considerate. The internet is like coming home and decompressing at the end of the day, after you’ve been married for twenty years:

Just the facts, Ma’am, just the facts.

When I crack a spine, I want to be lost in a story, but when I lift the lid of my laptop, I want INFORMATION, and I digest it like a hungry alligator, chewing without swallowing, bouncing from one website to the next, in some insane race with myself to see how much I can consume, and how quickly I can do it.

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not condemning the behavior. I love to learn this way, and a large part of why I go online thirty-seven thousand times each day is so that I can go to sleep slightly smarter than I was when I woke up, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t sometimes get a chill wondering about the information overload my children will be facing in another ten years.

Look how much the internet’s evolved in just a few short years. This September, a good percentage of kids going off to college have no memory of life before the ubiquity of the internet. What’s it going to be like for the pre-school set now?

My hopes are sky high.

For now, I choose to believe that some major sea change is right around the corner. Our educational institutions are going to have to wake up and realize that they’re teaching in a way that was out of date back when I was sitting behind the desk making up funny limericks about my teacher.

The internet’s still in diapers, and together, we share the task of raising it. But as we shape that alternate landscape, so we shape ourselves. My children see me on the computer a lot, but I make sure that at least once a day, they also see me with an old fashioned book in my hands and a quiet smile on my face.

The internet is amazing, but we must never forget what got us here.

Writer Dad

Check out the updated post on reading online. See if you can spot the changes.

The Other Side of the Dashboard