Thing 1: integration, evolution: motivation

There is one resonant idea that stays with me after reading all the rationales for implementing the "23 Things" project, as outlined by proponents and experts in our collective pre-registration reading. This is that current technology is not progressing in a series of disjointed and disrupting "upgrades", lurching forward(?) awkwardly, but rather evolving in a process of growth, inclusion, and integration. It is, therefore, a dynamic and constantly changing entity that incorporates our endlessly inventive human questions and goals into its manifold interfaces with us! This is a very new way of thinking, for me; I had always thought of the machinery and corresponding instructional material as burdensome but ultimately useful tool sets. I had not attached a philosophy to them. I simply used what was necessary to enable me to accomplish the tasks we tackle daily as library employees. I have been aware of the recreational aspects of technology without wishing to invite this tantalus of impossible choices into my own home. I am a bit of an iconoclast. I don't even take pictures while on vacations--I'd rather always be entirely in my life's moments, not recording them.

This said--how wonderful to be able to think in this new way, as the tools themselves become for the new users (and the newly initiated) a part of the whole fabric of connection between what we aspire to and what we can accomplish or become.This way of contemplating the technology proliferating in all our lives is intriguing, and makes a kind of hopeful sense to me.

Perhaps my strongest impetus to explore web technology via "23 Things" is someone whose first image was transmitted to us digitally, across oceans--my small Chinese-born niece. Seven years old, engaging, sociably adept and unreasonably bright, she is a star in my life.She is totally at home in her totally wired, thoroughly American environment--attached to her Webkin pets and a champ at WII bowling. She has a plethora of hand-held games that accompany her everywhere--and which she invites all her sattelite people to play with her. These acoutrements do not isolate her: they are tools for imaginative play, the ultimate appropriate activity for a seven-year-old. Through her parents' digital missives, I can see her latest art work (she's talented, too). I can celebrate her latest triumph with her real pink sparkly kidsized bowling ball at the real alley several states away. So--a reason to perservere! I need to keep up with this savvy, tuned-in new techie. She is the next generation and I aim to do right by her--and her cohorts, my patrons.