What are you doing right now?
This guy said it better than I think I could. Why? Grayson Davis is at least in the right age group to understand things that I don't. I don't understand how the cell phone became the constant companion of everybody born around the time I started college (or later). I actually find that to be very sad. It's a phone. A telephone. And even if your best friend is on the other end of it, you're still missing out on whatever is actually in front of your eyes, ears and other senses right now, or for that matter, what ISN'T constantly stimulating your senses. Maybe you'd like things to be a little quiet once in a while. You and the person on the other end of the phone aren't really talking, you're actually broadcasting this message on an ongoing basis "wherever we are right now, and whatever we're doing, does not merit our full attention."
I understand texting even less, and twittering is just an extension of that. "
Monkey mind" is the enemy of meditation. Actually, it's the enemy of a lot of things. Now, supposedly if you give enough monkeys keyboards, and somehow entice them to type constantly, there is a mathematical equation by which a given number of monkeys over a finite time period will result in a Shakespearean sonnet being produced by a monkey. You need a lot of time, and a lot of monkeys. We're still waiting for the proof to come in. Oddly, you could probably fit a sonnet within 140 characters-- that's a "tweet", if you worked at it. But the monkeys would need way more time, and if they forgot to hit "send" they'd have to start all over again. Which reminds me; a lot of people in my age group want a cell phone to be just a phone, not a Dick Tracy wristwatch (look it up) and we want it to be so simple that a monkey could operate it with very little practice.
While Sheryl and I do occasionally blog about our cat, we aren't constantly updating you on her status every fifteen minutes. I do understand however, that on twitter there is a house-cat with half a million followers. I didn't know she could type. Must have learned it from a monkey. Apparently she says the normal things that a human being anthropomorphizing an animal thinks she would say, like, "I slept, then I ate, then I slept some more." I heard about this on NPR, a radio network which employs many top experts to broadcast things which they think we will find interesting. Often we do.
Meow.
