Breaking the digital barrier.

Why is it that some technological innovations seem utterly natural to me? Others, I examine with all the benighted curiosity of the chimp in the famous scene of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

I adapted to email, instant messaging, conference messaging, mapquesting and google in all its various incarnations (movie finder, weather watcher, shopping agent, purchasing point etc. etc. in addition to regular find-anything) with ease and a sigh of satisfaction that my world now included these obviously useful features. I love the fact that I'm able to find long-lost anyone on the 'net and that I'm able to research the background of new acquaintances with just a few keystrokes. My politically prurient side adores the Huffington Post where I can snoop on the political contributions of my relatives. ("How dare my brother lavish thousands of dollars on the GOP? Our socialist mama must be turning in her grave.") My obsessive nature is deeply devoted to runstoppable.org, which allows me to log every foot I've ever jogged.

Text messaging, on the other hand, seems to belong to a world beyond my sluggish opposable thumbs, as does summoning directions to my cellphone via google or creating ingenious mashups of hitherto unrelated datasets. Why do these things? Why, for that matter, create those-- at best indiscreet---at worst, devastating--- little electronic temples to narcissism, the Facebook or MySpace page?

I'm sure part of it has to do with age and deteriorating eyesight. Can anyone with presbyopia fully master the possibilities offered by her cell phone? I can't even read the caller ID information when I'm driving. How am I supposed to summon movie reviews en route? (And, besides, my taste remains so resolutely oddball. The one movie I attempted to locate via cellphone was the well-reviewed Israeli production Jellyfish. With touching--if inaccurate--solicitude, 'call google' attempted to refer me to the nearest Biology Library.)

But it's not my failing eyes that present the greatest barriers. The true deal breaker is the inner restraint that used to go the name of ordinary discretion. It's reflexive in someone of my generation--unknown apparently in those who come after. I would rather undergo unspecified mental torture than reveal the cornucopia of personal details that seem to pass for expected content on blog after homepage after flckr account.

Text Message

I just sent my first. (Or, at least, I tried to). The recipient was my teenage son--the only person I could think of that knows the difference between a text message and a typewriter. It will probably come as a tremendous blow to him to realize that this teenage redoubt is now accessible by his mother!
I even looked up an online glossery of abbreviations, and composed the following message:

AYV MOS

This, to the unitiated, means: Are You Vertical? (a legitimate question given the fact that it is only 1;30 in the afternoon---the break of dawn, in other words, for any teenager in the opening days of summer vacation)
Mother Over Shoulder (the text msg. equivalent of telling him that Big Brother is watching.)

Thing 7

Anyway, at last a tool that I'm familiar with. Email and it's younger stepsister, IM. I thought I'd never prefer IM to picking up the phone, but in fact I switched over with frightening alacrity. Can it be that I'm not a people person after all?

Thing 5

I did not have More Fun with Flickr. Maybe it's because I'm such a non-visual person. I think in words--not images. So I'm completely nonplussed by the opportunity to do "creative things" with flickr images. I don't want to spell my name in pictures or find all the pictures in a particular shade of blue or any of the other proffered "10 Best" flickr applications. Plus, I'm sick of having to correct my typing each time I write f-l-i-c-k-e-r.

I'm sticking with my kid's prom photos, to be updated when my niece gets married next month.

Thing 4

I am now in proud possession of a flickr site, populated at this point exclusively by pictures of my 17-year-old son Teddy and his girlfriend, Erin, taken just as they were about to depart for the Junior Prom. Teddy and Erin are perfectly beautiful, although fiendishly red-eyed thanks to our camera technique. The pictures even feature cameo shots of me, my husband Paul and Erin's mother, hovering proudly on the edges of the action.
Oh, to be 17 again---but smarter this time!

Flickr

Flickr (is that how it's spelled? There is definitely a missing letter. What is the fashion for deliberate misspelling anyway? It's so much more time consuming to remember the wrong way than just to do it rght---joke.)
Anyway, Flickr has real potential. I plan to post Teddy's prom pictures for the world to enjoy.

Thing Number 3

Continuing at my own glacial pace, I have finally acquired an RSS feed site (is that the proper title?) and have stocked it with the minimum three required feeds--only one of which is new. As for the others--aldaily.com and NPR's Talk of the Nation---am I more likely to look at them now that there is an additional mediating layer of electronic 'stuff' between me and their content? I'm already overstimulated by the array of information inexorably bearing down on me.
What would my namesake, Henry James' inquiring journalist Henrietta, have made of all this? She thought of herself as a modernist but was much less successful at the enterprise than she supposed. (That's why I gave my blog her name.) Would she have enthusiastically embraced technology, but made a hash of it? Is this a fit topic for online speculation?
Well, on to the next technological summit to be scaled.