Postcards from the Funny Farm

Do you ever watch reruns from the 70’s and 80’s, before cell phones and the internet, and think to yourself: “Was life ever really that simple?” With much technology has come much anxiety in people of the world. It used to be that to get a hold of someone you had to catch them on the phone or knock on their door. Now, we all know there are a myriad of ways to reach someone besides these archaic methods. The result is that we are always on the edge of our seat waiting for our many “machines” to “talk to (us).”How many machines do you talk to? In other words, how many ways does the news of the world and the group of people in your world talk to you through the machines? Need some examples? Here are some machines that talk to me daily and the ways they do it:

1. My blog: I write in my blog every day. Lately I have been posting multiple times because I post snippets as well as prose, such as this post. I post interesting stuff I run across on the web every day. Checking for responses through comments, trackbacks, or through traffic counts on Google Analytics is the way my “machine” of a blog “talks to me.”
2. Twitter: Though I’ve been on hiatus, I enjoy checking my machine called “Twitter” to see what the 19 people I “follow” have posted. I’ve also integrated this into the footer of my blog in the form of a constantly updating “postcard.” My Twitter machine talks to me multiple times daily.
3. My Gmail: I love this free email service. it is the best I have encountered thus far. Through the GTalk program, I recieve a pop-up alert from my Gmail machine whenever anyone emails me or comments on my blog. If I am online, my machine contacts me this way, I don’t even have to click anything.
4. My Work Email: I wish I didn’t check this at home. I guess I am a workaholic this way. I’m mulling over the concept of shutting this machine down when I am at home. So far there has not been anything that couldn’t wait until I am at work anyway. Home ought to be pure RnR.
5. My Google Reader: *sigh* This is a mammoth machine that talks to me throughout the day. I add RSS “feeds” to it of sites, news, and blogs I want to keep updated on. On a given day I get 4-500 updates and getting through them can be quite an ordeal. I keep this monster alive though because this is where I get most of my best ideas to write on and abreast of what my blogger friends are doing.
6. CoComments: This is a new machine I am trying out. My understanding is that it allows me to track all the comments I leave on blogs and interactive sites across the web. I like it so far, but it seems just as easy to subscribe to comments on most machines or subscribe to their comments RSS through Google reader. After a couple more weeks I will write my review of this machine.
7. My answering machine on my home phone: I screen most my calls. Throughout the day this machine gives me 0-3 messages tops. This is a tame machine.
8. Cell messages: These are also minor. 0-2 a week probably.
9. Letter Mail: My wife sorts this mostly. I get probably 2-3 messages a month.
10. TIVO: Every day or so, I look at the TV listings through Yahoo! TV and set my TIVO with the shows I want to record for the day or week. When I am at work or out in the world or even at home, I am often eager for my TIVO machine to talk to me with the shows I have recorded. “What’s on the box?” is a common phrase in our home. TIVO is a good machine that I enjoy hearing from.
11. News: I mostly get this on Google Reader, but reading the news of the day is a very good machine that I talk to in a variety of formats.

I hope you enjoyed this and maybe you saw yourself a little in my revelations above. We have become a society that lets its machines talk to it. Conversations with people seem secondary to the stuff we get from machines. Maybe I need more “irl” friends? I’m not sure, it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea! But what will they think of all my machines? Have we grown too comfortable with all this technology? Can you add any questions or answers to this post? Talk to my machine and I will get back to yours ;)