Touch

Sitting here with my first cup of coffee and my first cigarette, I am struck by how much technology has changed, even in my lifetime. We are attached(pun intended) to our cell phones, PDAs, laptops, desktops, DVDs, CDs, MP3 players and the like. Our lives sometimes seem to revolve around our "devices". We panic in an area with a bad cell signal, or get angry when the local video store is all out of the latest release. We have to have the the latest, fastest widgets and gadgets that we can get our hands on. And I am no more or no less dependent on these things than anyone else. Take this blog, for example. Ten years ago, in the infancy of the Internet, there weren't any blogs, Yet this morning, I'm sitting at a computer in a little town in Illinois,writing down my thoughts, observations and feelings, with the potential that they could be read by millions of people. It boggles the mind. My grandmother, who died in 1999 at the age of 96, could never grasp the concept of how a cell phone worked. My daughters will see advances that I won't be able to grasp. Yet some times I wonder whether we, with all our technological prowess, have somehow removed the human factor from communication. It's hard to send a hug, a touch, or a smile in an E-mail or text message. I think my gramma would be awestruck, and a little worried.