The cloud and I

In the early 90s, before the web entered our consciousness, I envisioned plugging into a virtual world of shared imagination. A sci-fi fan told me I had to read Neuromancer. Science fiction is not my thing, so I listened to tapes of William Gibson drawling his way through Neuromancer while commuting from Berkeley to Sausalito. The image of the crazed main character Case jacking into cyberspace with his deck found a permanent home in my neural circuitry. Now it feels as if the fiction is becoming reality.

Touch-typing was far and away the most useful course I took in high school.  I gained the autonomic muscle-memory that lets me riff at the keyboard without thinking about keys. Ideas come; text appears. It’s marvelous. Occasionally I flash on Gibson’s damaged anti-hero Case, connecting to cyberspace for salvation and a fix. (Gibson invented the term cyberspace to describe the virtual world of Neuromancer.) He’d grab his deck (my deck is usually the keyboard on one of my Macs or my iPad) and jack in.

At this moment, I’m tapping keys on a Mac in Berkeley. Characters are pouring into the Cloud. I’m jacked in. I am not really concerned whether I’m entering text into one of my blogs or a shared blog or a comment on someone else’s blog or a wiki or whatever. It’s going into the cloud. If the message warrants repeating, someone will Tweet it or Digg it or Diigo it or share it in a public space. It’s all in the Cloud somewhere. You can find it with a search if it’s worth finding. I don’t have to choose a pigeonhole for it. You or I or anybody else will be able to retrieve it from cyberspace when the time is right.

From here on out, I don’t intend to waste brain cycles speculating where to put things. My business blog, my informal learning blog, one of my wikis and so on. Who cares about where I’m standing when I pitch a new concept into cyberspace?

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