time, I even believed it.
All this backstory matters, because, in a funny kind of way, being ... well, cut off has been such a central theme for me. You might almost say that going off the grid has been the story of my adult life. It has certainly served as the wellspring of my IT attachment issues. Simply put, digital media have made it possible for me to live in two places at once—Australia and America—in a mind/body split so sustained and ambitious, it makes Descartes look like a cheese grater.
When I arrived in Western Australia in 1986, an airmail letter from New York took two weeks to arrive. (“You needed special onion-skin paper, special stamps, special stickers,” I tell the kids in a quavery voice. “Seriously, we’re talking one step beyond sealing wax and a signet ring.”) Trans-hemispheric phone calls were like Woody Allen’s joke about the meals at the Catskills resort: They were terrible and you never got enough of them. Annoying three-second transmission delays ensured plenty of awkward silences and inaudible cross-talk, and an eerie, swishing echo that lent conversation all the intimacy of a Jacques Cousteau special. In fact, “conversing” was a misnomer. Basically, you gurgled. And if the party you were speaking to recognized it as your gurgle, you were satisfied.
There were even bigger problems than the four-week turnaround to find out how your two-month-old nephew was (now that he was your three-month-old nephew). The New York Times crossword puzzle, for example. Like Rapunzel pining for rampion, my craving for it grew so intense that my worried husband was forced to forage for it—in one case, in the U.S. Consulate General’s office on St. George’s Terrace. It’s a kindness I have never forgotten.
Today, The New York Times is my homepage. I read it on my iPhone on the train to work. I do the daily puzzle then, too, if I feel like it. But there’s really no rush. Because as a premium crossword member, I have access to more than four thousand other puzzles, and solutions, from the Times ’s archives.☺
How can I begin to explain how such innovations have changed my life? I stream NPR’s Morning Edition live in my bedroom (albeit in the late evening the previous day, owing to deep time-zone weirdness). I listen to a gazillion U.S. podcasts through my car radio—including almost every program broadcast by my “home” public radio station, WNYC. WNYC! On the Kwinana Freeway, heading south over the Swan River. Past the suburbs of Dog Swamp and Innaloo, and the aspirationally titled Perth Entertainment Center!
I can talk to my family via e-mail, Facebook, IM, or Skype, instantaneously and in real time, whenever I want to. With webcams, we can pretend we’re all in the same room, let alone the same hemisphere. (Which, come to think of it, is maybe why we don’t do it that often ...) I can call my sister’s cell phone on Long Island from my cell phone in Fremantle. I can order American music, books, and DVDs direct from Amazon. I can download American television direct from iTunes—occasionally going to heroic technological lengths to do so (by purchasing a U.S. iTunes gift card on eBay in Australian dollars from some guy in Spain, as I did recently).
Before the Internet, getting books from the States—or even from Sydney or Melbourne—was a long-haul operation. A shipping delay of three to six months was standard. No exaggeration, the words “sea mail” make me nauseated to this day. Today, I can get an e-book as fast as anybody, anywhere—in about a minute. The first time I tried it, I literally wept for joy.
For an information junkie in exile like me, the dawning of the digital age has been like the arrival of a rescue ship.
Even on the occasion of my first encounter online—back when “websites,” so-called, consisted largely of dense pages of alphanumerics—I knew instantly that my world, and by extension THE world, had shifted on its axis, irreversibly. The chill
All this backstory matters, because, in a funny kind of way, being ... well, cut off has been such a central theme for me. You might almost say that going off the grid has been the story of my adult life. It has certainly served as the wellspring of my IT attachment issues. Simply put, digital media have made it possible for me to live in two places at once—Australia and America—in a mind/body split so sustained and ambitious, it makes Descartes look like a cheese grater.
When I arrived in Western Australia in 1986, an airmail letter from New York took two weeks to arrive. (“You needed special onion-skin paper, special stamps, special stickers,” I tell the kids in a quavery voice. “Seriously, we’re talking one step beyond sealing wax and a signet ring.”) Trans-hemispheric phone calls were like Woody Allen’s joke about the meals at the Catskills resort: They were terrible and you never got enough of them. Annoying three-second transmission delays ensured plenty of awkward silences and inaudible cross-talk, and an eerie, swishing echo that lent conversation all the intimacy of a Jacques Cousteau special. In fact, “conversing” was a misnomer. Basically, you gurgled. And if the party you were speaking to recognized it as your gurgle, you were satisfied.
There were even bigger problems than the four-week turnaround to find out how your two-month-old nephew was (now that he was your three-month-old nephew). The New York Times crossword puzzle, for example. Like Rapunzel pining for rampion, my craving for it grew so intense that my worried husband was forced to forage for it—in one case, in the U.S. Consulate General’s office on St. George’s Terrace. It’s a kindness I have never forgotten.
Today, The New York Times is my homepage. I read it on my iPhone on the train to work. I do the daily puzzle then, too, if I feel like it. But there’s really no rush. Because as a premium crossword member, I have access to more than four thousand other puzzles, and solutions, from the Times ’s archives.☺
How can I begin to explain how such innovations have changed my life? I stream NPR’s Morning Edition live in my bedroom (albeit in the late evening the previous day, owing to deep time-zone weirdness). I listen to a gazillion U.S. podcasts through my car radio—including almost every program broadcast by my “home” public radio station, WNYC. WNYC! On the Kwinana Freeway, heading south over the Swan River. Past the suburbs of Dog Swamp and Innaloo, and the aspirationally titled Perth Entertainment Center!
I can talk to my family via e-mail, Facebook, IM, or Skype, instantaneously and in real time, whenever I want to. With webcams, we can pretend we’re all in the same room, let alone the same hemisphere. (Which, come to think of it, is maybe why we don’t do it that often ...) I can call my sister’s cell phone on Long Island from my cell phone in Fremantle. I can order American music, books, and DVDs direct from Amazon. I can download American television direct from iTunes—occasionally going to heroic technological lengths to do so (by purchasing a U.S. iTunes gift card on eBay in Australian dollars from some guy in Spain, as I did recently).
Before the Internet, getting books from the States—or even from Sydney or Melbourne—was a long-haul operation. A shipping delay of three to six months was standard. No exaggeration, the words “sea mail” make me nauseated to this day. Today, I can get an e-book as fast as anybody, anywhere—in about a minute. The first time I tried it, I literally wept for joy.
For an information junkie in exile like me, the dawning of the digital age has been like the arrival of a rescue ship.
Even on the occasion of my first encounter online—back when “websites,” so-called, consisted largely of dense pages of alphanumerics—I knew instantly that my world, and by extension THE world, had shifted on its axis, irreversibly. The chill
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