Quiver & Quill

Originally uploaded by Planet Pixel.

I urge you to read Ross Mayfield , Alex Soojun-Kim and David Perscovitz’s discussion about the death of cyberspace. Which term will replace cyberspace? Ross Mayfield suggests ‘On.’ On implies perpetual connectedness. It’s our culture of immediate mobile, online, digital, portable access to anything from anywhere. Only a few years ago, signing ‘On’ took effort. It now takes effort to sign off. Ross reminds us: “We need to retain Off as a right.”

What is Off? How do you disconnect from the connected society in which you live? I’ll leave you to ponder this with Thoreau’s famous Walden Pond quote:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the
essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and
not, when I came to die, to discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to
live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice
resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out
all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout
all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into
a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why
then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to
the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to
give a true account of it in my next excursion – Henry David Thoreau

As I side note, I checked my email (on my Treo 650) while walking around Walden Pond about week ago. With all due respect Mr. Thoreau, can you hear me now?

Photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/planetpixel/50569504/

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