Interactions in Real Time

This piece of flash was published by Every Day Fiction: http://www.everydayfiction.com/reality-fails-by-jo-rhett/

I actually wrote this piece on demand. It has a funny origination story.

I arrived early at a Loscon panel to overhear the panelists concerned about a misprint in the program book. The panel was supposed to be about the panelists reviewing work submitted by the audience, much like a mini-Clarion workshop or Iron Editor panel. Unfortunately the program book had written this up incorrectly, and the panelists were concerned that nobody would show up with things to review.

This piece of flash was what I quickly typed into my iMac based on a dream I had woken up to that morning. The panelists liked it, and urged me to submit it.

I’ve been making some difficult choices recently, to give up on things I simply don’t have enough time or interest to do any more. What I gave up this week was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Not because it didn’t make sense — it totally made sense. I hadn’t touched the bass guitar in over a year, except perhaps to dust it. It was time to let it go.

But this reaches more than twenty years back into my soul. I remember those years when it seemed that a life of music was the only possible path for me. Not just that I lived and breathed music — in my choice of friends, in my free time, and in my dreams — but because no other life path seemed likely or possible for me.

I still love music. But my creative interest lies now in writing code and writing fiction. It has been too many years since I found myself sprawled on the bed, running my fingers down the neck, teasing each note out until the walls shrunk in. Until demons in the air lifted me up to hear the glass and wood surrounding me reverberate in harmony with my angst.

No, music isn’t where my creative energy lies any more. It was good to pass those instruments to a new home, and focus on the characters who call me now.

Perhaps the thing I love most about technology is how it changes our lives. In ways we can forsee, and in ways we can hardly imagine.

Sixty years ago everybody assumed we’d have flying cars by now. We’re not even close to that, however most of us walk around with more computing power on our hip than existed on the entire planet sixty years ago. This has changed us much more than flying cars would.

But the most intriguing thing is not what new technology brings us today, or even how one technology changes us. The most intriguing part is how these changes interact.

Like we already see with designer drugs: the problem is rarely the effect of the drug, so much as the unforseen and difficult to test interactions with anything else the recipient takes or even is, when genetics themselves play a role. The changes brought to us by technology are similar. I don’t think that Facebook alone has changed us half so much as the interaction between all of the social media today, how it enables us and how it limits us. How we take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine 5 years before.

How has this changed you, and how much better or worse is your life now?