Do I hear the distant (very distant) roar of the crowd as Barbara Bensoussan takes her first wobbly hesitant baby steps into the blogosphere? In my family this is cause for hilarity since I’ve long since earned the label of technology-challenged. I’m the lonely little petunia in an onion patch of technophiles: a husband who’s a crack programmer and kids who seem to have been born with digital cameras and cell phones in their hands. My rare feeble attempts to send text messages simply send them into gales of laughter (after which they roll their eyes grab the phone from my hand and say with adolescent condescension “Let me do it for you Mommy”).
It’s not just that I’m a klutz around electronics or am pitifully uninterested in gadgets. Instead of greeting new developments with excitement and interest like my kids I find myself feeling like an old fogy suspicious and resistant to change. It pains me to contemplate the prospect of e-books and Kindles colonizing the literary world as print books dwindle in numbers like Indians forced into reservations and cut down by disease. Why just this week Border’s bookstores declared bankruptcy — Border’s! (Permit me a moment of nostalgia here because in another life when I was a graduate student in Ann Arbor I used to regularly browse the original Border’s store. I can still see the artfully arranged stacks of new offerings and the smell of book bindings and paper …)
But a girl can only stand with her head in the sand so long before she starts choking on clods of earth. It’s time to get with the program to join the twenty-first century! Print media (with the exception of Jewish magazines of course J!) may be on the way out but there’s a brave new world awaiting us and it’s all about interactive writing.
In the olden days (like five years ago) we writers would send our articles and books out into the world cross our fingers and hope for the best like a parent sending a child off to summer camp praying the other kids will like him. But now we can have immediate feedback — your feedback — and that opens up a whole new realm of possibilities for dialogue. We can go beyond the old letter-to-the-editor or occasional cherished fan letter and have a real back-and-forth.
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