(Repost with minor edits from August 24, 2011 over at my OldTimeRadioDiner blog, no longer active. I started that back when I thought I could keep two going at the same time.)
I've noticed this in myself. I connect better with information on a conference call than I do in a meeting around a table with live bodies. I use an earpiece and microphone and will often stand and tilt my monitor so I can pace while listening. If I sit down, I'm a goner; email, chat, or the web will suck me in.[2]
I'm in Michigan now. I miss many things about Pennsylvania, one of them the cicadas.[3] They arrive early August there and sing through the last few weeks of summer. Michigan must be a little colder or dryer or something; we get a few in West Michigan but not many. In PA the trees are alive with the creatures; you can't see them, not until they shed their exoskeletons and enter the next stage of cicada life (which I know nothing about but must be very quiet).
[1]
Our Western heritage, especially the last 150 years or so, has conditioned us to understand human progress as an ascent from the inferior to the superior.
We're tempted to (and usually do) classify the pencil as an improvement over the stylus, paper over clay, books over speech, TV over radio, the computer over the typewriter, tablet over laptop, etc.
To be sure, each of these technologies has advantages over its predecessor, but they're not improvements in the same fashion that, say, this year's Intel processor is better than last year's. Scientists tell us that for recorded history, the intelligence of our ancestors was probably equal to ours. In other words, the same brains that built the pyramids could put a man on the moon if they had the same education and tools. (And that is probably true a lot further back than the ancient Egyptians, possibly 200,000 years back.)
Likewise, the same literary mind behind The Epic of Gilgamesh could have produced The Iliad or Paradise Lost or Leaves of Grass. A word is a word is a word, in clay, on paper, or blinking back at me from my computer; of course it's inextricably fixed in its context (literal and physical) and connected in ways we cannot fully understand because we were not there - did not kiln the clay and do not speak the language. There is as much a connection between a stylus and clay as there is between ink and paper; if you didn't live in a culture where poetry was a tactile accompaniment to an oral tradition, you can't understand Gilgamesh the way Mesopotamians understood it, which is to say, we don't.[2]
Many will insist on face-to-face meetings because they assume everyone processes information the same way they do and need to be in front of each other to be accountable. It would be nice if everyone were a teacher, if only for a little while, to observe the different ways people process information.[3]
There's also a sweet summer grass I miss, not lawn grass (I'm not particularly fond of that, or the sound of lawn mowers, to tell you the truth, or the entire culture around it that includes pricey man-toys, subdivisions, white picket fences, suits and ties and 2.5 kids); rather, this is a wild grass that blooms in summer. I've never smelled it anywhere else. I briefly smelled something somewhat like it on a playground in Grand Rapids; I must have looked odd as I put my nose to every wild flower I saw, but I couldn't find the source, and after all was done couldn't be sure I smelled it at all.
[2013-06-29: This post is too pretentious.]
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