the sex life of computers: a novel

Friday evening, in a fit of stupidity, I broke my phone. Good job.
Despite God's best intentions to quell my social life, I have been relying on my amazing(!) friends and significant other to organize and keep me up to date on gatherings that otherwise would be texted to my phone. I'm so lucky to have people who care about me and take care of me when my motivation is lacking.

Being phoneless has also made me realize just "hooked into machines" we are. We have wires leading from our pockets to our ears, "crackberries" glued to our hands like an extra digit and cameras in our back pockets. We converse back and forth through an alternate reality and forget about the moment in front of us and the friends beside us. Besides portable computers and palm-pilots, universities and cities are littered with places to plop down and hook into cyberspace. I am currently using a computer, owned by Stony Brook university, and I can't walk a mile without discovering another "sinc site" where I can update this blog.

Phenomena like facebook, once a mildly frivolous "professional tool" is now a far reaching extension of our social lives. If a subject is interesting, make sure to get it on the F-Book by taking a picture, or broadcasting it as your status. In the "about me" section, you can list yourself in a relationship with one option being "It's complicated." Though quite often in conversation I hear "it's complicated," when inquiring about someone's love life, I never ever heard it before facebook became so widely used. It seems to me that facebook has dictated new social norms and redefined what is okay/not okay in the dating world, simply because there is an option other than "In a relationship with _____." What exactly listing myself in an "It's complicated," entails, I'm not sure.

However I have no more time to blog, I have to check facebook. I know that there were pictures of me from this weekend uploaded, and I have to untag the nasties! Who knows what awful, incriminating photographs made their way to my friends' photo "albums" and I don't want my reputation tarnished. Keeping it nice and squeaky clean.

just keeping it real.
Eli.