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Back to the wild ride that is Momalom’s Five for Ten! Five topics. Ten days. A hundred bloggers. More reading material than you could get through if it was your full-time job.
Today’s topic is Memory. (Our earlier topics: Happiness and Courage.) Find more Memory posts here.
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My oldest two kids just finished explaining to me that my laptop is old-fashioned. They may have a point, but still.
Remember how we didn’t even used to have the internet? Or at least not web 2.0. We didn’t have devices and gadgets and twitter! Remember?
Yeah, I baked a lot more bread back then.
Of course, I only had one kid, so that may also have affected my time-spending choices.
I know plenty of people like to bemoan our “always-on” internet culture, and talk about the banality of our social media interactions (“Who cares what you ate for breakfast?”), but you know what? Most in-person conversation is kind of banal, too. And before we started talking online, I don’t think I’d had an uninterrupted conversation with anyone but my husband in three and a half years.
Now we can talk to each other over break time and nap time and middle-of-the-night-we-should-be-sleeping time, and we can have conversations of as much or as little substance as we like. Every day.
So while it may have been easier not to have technological distractions from the rest of our lives, I’m not convinced it was better. Just different. Different I will admit to. Better… well, maybe if you really like bread.
I’m not a big fan of bread, myself. It’s hard to think back to life without the internet.
Its a worthwhile tradeoff, I think. Mostly, anyway.
I’m with C. Homemade bread is over-rated! Back in the “olden days” it was quite difficult to reconnect with an old high school friend. Thanks to Facebook I found a dear friend from high school and found out she only lives 40 miles away from me (and we live 1000 miles away from where we grew up.) I’ll take now over than any day!
The magic of internet connection! Isn’t that cool?
I love to bake bread, but it always comes out too dense.
Before the internet, I used to plow voraciously through stacks of library books. I also used to watch more television. I think I wasted just as much time back then, just in different ways.
Yes– I think in a lot of ways I’m more deliberate with my time now, even if there is less bread-baking. No television, yes internet… and I still check out the stacks of library books, but I’m much quicker to send them back now if they’re not working for me. Mostly it’s just a different balance than pre-internet.
I’m with Sandy. I think I watched more TV before the Internet, and maybe was a little more efficient with chores. But I also never talked to my family or friends. And I had to actually go to the store to shop, which was a problem at times other than the Christmas season because the stores were closed when I finally had time to shop. And nobody ever saw pictures of my kids. But like you, it’s hard to separate out which changes are due to children and which are due to Internet usage. I do love homemade bread, though. =)
Okay, technically I’ve never been efficient with chores. That may yet come, in some future imagined life. I don’t know. But at least now I can keep up with people I wouldn’t see every day, right?
I agree with you – it’s just different. Who’s to say better or worse?
Yeah, different is just different.
The internet is a huge time suck. But I don’t know what I’d be doing otherwise – other than, you know, cleaning the kitchen! So back to Twitter I go!
Twitter over kitchen any day! (Or every day…)
There are so many great bakers in the world. Let them do what they do best.
I can’t imagine a world without my blackberry, laptop, twitter, blogs. I’ve never been so social without leaving my house. Its the best of both worlds. Never alone, not neglecting my kids.
I just got a new laptop for mother days. Macbook Pro….it’s awesome.
It kind of is like having both, isn’t it? Social but in my pajamas. Nice.
This is so great. Thanks for making me think of the internet in a different way. Usually, I feel guilty about my usage and think that too much of the internet can be problematic, but I also love love love it! You remind me why. And you’re right–life is not necessarily better or worse, just different.
There are definitely things to love about it! I like my life simple most of the time– and for me, the internet makes things simpler rather than more complex. Trying to find another way to have adult conversation in real life would be much more complicated than this!
I was just having this “remember when” conversation with my 14yo stepdaughter. Whenever she doesn’t have an answer for an assignment, she either googles it or video chats with a classmate to find out. I felt so incredibly *old* when I thought back to high school when I had to look things up in my mom’s Encyclopedia Britannica. What the freak did we do before the internet??
For some things (research and shopping both come to mind), I don’t want to remember what we did before the internet! It wasn’t pretty, that’s for sure.
I have to admit, I really do like bread.
Sometimes it’s too much connecting for me. I feel like there is an overwhelming crush of people of out there and I just unplug for a week or three.
Well, bread is nice.
Plus taking stock of what feeds you and what drains you is always wise, and I imagine we each need a different balance of online socializing/in-person socializing/being solitary. Unplugging is as much a tool as plugging in, I think.
THANK YOU FOR MAKING ME FEEL BETTER ABOUT MY INTERNET ADDICTION THESE DAYS. I know, I’ve bit a little more THAN A LITTLE MORE busy on the blogosphere over the last week. But, if we go back back back to the original Five For Ten post, it really REALLY (i SWEAR) is about making more connections. Fostering more connections. Finding more people that I can gripe to about my saucy 3-year-old who will scream WATERMELON all the way home and BEG ME TO STOP AT THE STORE.
Because, you KNOW you wanted to hear that?
And why on earth am I SHOUTING?
(I’ve clearly had TOO MUCH Internet. Shut me DOWN)
Okay, just 486 more comments to go! And then you can rest! Until tomorrow!
Connections are good stuff, man. And when they’re hard to come by in real life, I like how the internet is there to supplement for us.