Extemporaneous Ramblings

I am a member of several interest groups and also a Board of Directors. These groups are mostly populated by intelligent and enthusiastic people. They communicate, for the most part, articulately and willingly. Their willingness to explore better communications ends abruptly and uncharactistically, however, when it comes to innovative use of technology to facilitate the dialog.

Most of these groups communicate regularly via the internet. Most have matured enough in net use to use email. As the group grows, of course, the cc lists become spotty as people come or go, and very long lists give some mail clients problems. Add to that the problems that come with an overloaded inbox, and you would think that people would embrace an alternative offering less symptoms and more convenience. You would be wrong…

I suggested that a discussion forum would solve many of the problems (and it would). But getting a large percentage of the group populace to learn the tiny bit of protocol needed to use a forum, let alone actually type a message into it, has proved to be a problem of shocking magnitude.

Then we have those who are challenged into terror by even too much email.

It leaves me shaking my head in dismay that the possibility of expanding group discussion while at the same time reducing individual overhead is so hard to sell.

I just don’t get it and it drives me crazy…

Well, it had to happen. As a commercial user my internet connection is Very stable. Nonetheless, when Murphy paid a visit today to a major upstream link, viola, no net.

Having just read the other day in the paper about CrackBerry addiction, it is interesting how totally dependant I am on net access for everyday life.

No email = major withdrawl and major disconnection from everyday contacts. Only when they are interrupted does it become clear how many interactive email conversations I carry on during a day.

No Web = the inability to contact people whose numbers or addresses needed to be looked up and/or GoogleEarth’d in order to find them. I eventually had to dig in the car for legacy technology - an actual map.

No connection with the online teaching system at work.

Sound like much todo about nothing? Guess again! The result was the inhibition of a set of habits that happen every few minutes one way or another. Had I not been out at a meeting (one at which ‘I’ didn’t need the net) it would have been much worse.

So here I am on the net reporting the pains from a short withdrawl from the net.

Good thing that I DON’T have a BlackBerry…Maybe I should refer to my laptop as a CrackTop…