As I’ve spent the better part of the past two days migrating my life’s work from one laptop to a new one, I’ve been pondering the nature of life in what to some at least is Web 2.0 age. Although I’ve probably spent the better portion of the past decade engaged in communications that have increasingly incorporated and even relied upon electronic media, I can’t honestly say that I’ve ever consciously thought about the poetic or philosophical aspects of it all that much until recently – it was simply something I did.
However as I have now made the leap from the world of the carpet covered cubicle to the realm of the free-range “knowledge worker,” I find it increasingly necessary to pay conscious attention to the trends and developments in modern communication. Consider if you will that in addition to being a professional natural history focused writer, blogger, and reviewer, I am also a consultant – a specialist in advising firms and organizations with products, services, or activities that center around some aspect of nature. Logic says that therefore I would spend a considerable amount of time out of doors honing my skills in that environment. Yet in truth I spent at least as much time positioned in front of my trusty laptop arranging electrons into a reflection of my thoughts.
What would John Muir or John Burroughs think should either of them suddenly appear beside me here in the Starbuck’s in which I am writing this essay? Well, aside from being thoroughly perplexed at the ultra-lounge / electronic / ambient jazz playing over the stereo system, I think they might actually approve. Muir might have been a bit of a Luddite in some ways, but I think he would have relished the opportunity to spread the word about the glories of Yosemite and the wonders of the backcountry there with a readership that is both global and exponentially larger than that to which his writings were circulated in his own day. As for Burroughs… well, he was already something of a rock star nature writer during his own lifetime. His Facebook page alone would likely be one of those citing thousands of friends.
None of this, of course, detracts from the irony of the fact that as a writing naturalist and adviser to those who steer their metaphorical ships upon the seas of commerce (turbulent though those seas may be at the moment), my usual kit bag includes both a binocular as well as a BlackBerry, and a magnifying loop as well as a laptop. Further irony is incurred in the fact that the very natural world around which I center my creative and commercial activities is sometimes also put in jeopardy in order to establish the infrastructure by which my multifaceted media world exists.
Thus in the words of one of my favorite philosophers, James Buffett, “Where it all ends I can’t fathom my friends; if I could I might just toss out my anchor.” Perhaps coming to terms with both irony and contradiction is simply the product of now having passed over four decades upon the Terra. Perhaps I am simply punch-drunk from negotiating the terms of transfer by which so much of my productive life of the past few years was finally migrated from one mysterious black metal, softly whirring box to another. Perhaps it is due to the fact that when I sat down to write this I bit into a Madeline cookie which I chose as an accompaniment to my coffee and threw myself unforeseeably into a Proustian state. Whatever the case, I bid you, as always,
Peace and good bird watching.
