The Machine Stops

The Machine Stops

The BlackBerry network went down today. The outage lasted about three hours. Roughly speaking, that’s about three hundred messages, blog posts, and feed updates. I got nothing. Nothing at all. Nothing to read, nothing to learn, nothing to think about. The silence was deafening.

Yet silence did give me time to think. In our cybercentric society, connectivity is our lifeblood. Being disconnected brings a weird bloodless feeling. It reminded me of some stories I had read about the dystopian future, where mankind becomes overly dependent upon technology. What would I do if the BlackBerry network stayed disconnected?

Just as I had this thought, the connectivity picked back up. Feeds poured into my device. A hundred voices asked: have you had any ideas lately?

Back to the machine.

Posted by