Sssshhh, I’m in the library so keep it down. Don’t want to get kicked out because one of you lot gets rowdy!

Bloody love this place.  There is something so nice about being in a place where everyone knows they have to be quiet.  People speaking in whispers, walking silently, moving slowing.  Everyone has come here for the same reason.  To work in peace and not to be disturbed, so there is a mutual understanding and respect.

Sitting here now it strikes me how very different things are from when I first came to college, over 250 years ago.  At the table I’m sitting at, there are four other people and looking down the room I can see around twenty four more.  Of all these people there is only one person that does not have a laptop open in front of her (and its not me folks….who knew I was so Rad and hip).  I’m amazed.  I generally don’t bring in the laptop, prefer to write everything longhand but, today I needed to transcribe the work I had done over the past few days. And while technology is great I find it a bit of a distraction.  Could be my tiny brain’s miniscule attention span but, when I’m on the computer,  it takes all my will-power to focus purely on the writing and not get sidelined by the dazzling sluts that are facebook and twitter.  If real work needs to get done just give me a pen and paper and I’ll be grand.

But looking at all these tech heads tap tapping away in here today I realise that I am probably in the minority (excluding that loner I mentioned already, a few desk down, who is reading an actual book).  All these kids have grown up with technology at their fingertips, the world available to them at the click of a mouse.  Back in the stone age, when God was a gasur and I was in first year at UCG, there was no such thing as the Interweb! If you wanted to learn about something, you went to the library, searched for the book and read it.  We had continuously sore, inky fingers from writing notes and pressing “Go” on the photocopier and bad posture from carrying tonnes of notes and folders around in our back packs!  But, we knew no different.  Didn’t miss what we didn’t have, what nobody had.  If the Internet was to explode tomorrow I don’t think this generation would cope.  I can see a post internet apocalypse, with expressionless zombies staring at blank screens hitting reload again and again and again.  My generation would be stunned for a while but I think we’d recover a lot quicker.

The internet is great.  It opens a window to the universe.  We can go anywhere, see anything, learn everything.  But, sometimes its just nice to knock it all off and live in the moment.  Just be.  Be where you are, with whoever is there, be present.  Feel the book in your hand, smell the pages and see the words crafted in ink.  There’s a lot to be said for getting carried away with your own imagination, creating in your own head and not relying on the links, and photos that others have created and uploaded.

So I’m going to sign off, and I recommend you do too.  Gonna get a cuppa, sit outside and read a book until my lecture starts.  Beautiful day for it folks.

Smell ya later!

Debs xx