Sometimes a step back to gaze at the big picture brings oxygen back to the capillaries.
Often, this involves evaluating full circle moments. Bookends. Turning points. Milestones. Halfway points.
In projects, it’s easier to find your midpoint than in life. It’s the proverbial 50% mark in Microsoft Project on your topline summary task. Simply, tally your series of “percent completes” into some view of what’s left to do.
But devoid of a crusty old Project Management tool, this website must use its editorial calendar to determine the midway point. And we can say, dear friend, that our trajectory of stories indeed shows we’ve reached the halfway point of our Journey.
Yes, Carisa H-K had it all planned out from the start. Which is how she lives her life as well.
But actually, what about life? We’re vexed by not knowing our halfway point. And the end point… well, that may be the most important of all. We never know how much time is left. Thus emerged this project, Tales from Digital Deliria: a fulfillment of some proof that “we were here”. It’s a milestone in personal perseverance and drive, despite the odds of a rather dire year. Something your humble writer never thought she could achieve.
That drive will continue into other projects as part of a greater vision. As such, Tales from Digital Deliria will move to a less frequent post cycle, to make time to focus on these longer-term goals.
Remember: half of the journey still remains. A keen eye may have recognized the secret to our sojourn. Tales from Digital Deliria is an online novel, taking shape through multiple, quick-read episodes. To go back in time, hit the first story and click links under “Previous”. Or, start where you wish and use “Next” to experience digital life as it unfolds. You choose the direction!
What remains is all in-plan: all to be revealed in the final act. So enjoy a lemon sorbet intermezzo, cleanse your palette, and think: What do you want to accomplish in the“remaining half” of your life as well?
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments.
Twenty years later, the dot-com boom agency remains as the only workplace utopia she ever experienced. Not just because of cutting-edge web work devoid of deadline & deliverable pressure. Or the fact it was the first proper office building she worked in – a major upgrade from the old warehouse.
But rather, because of the opportunity to really take a moment and get to know people. In this environment, mentorship and learning approached hyperspeed. The conversation wasn’t always driven selfishly by the deadline ahead, but a true appreciation for others’ skills, unique knowledge, and lives.
She considers the fondest memories of so many characters:
The Java guy who loved to socialize: swinging by the desk for no reason, but to say “Hi” and talk shop. He was a published leader and speaker in his field – there’s not many people you meet like that.
The most brilliant copywriter and sometime-documentarian she ever had the privilege of working with.
The designer who always played “Jump Around” on Friday mornings, livening our path to the weekend.
The sharp Project Manager with her own corner office – rendering her almost too good to even approach!
The young client on the cutting edge of eLearning, with an inexplicable love for Barry Manilow.
The developers who bridged both creative and technical – whipping out animated CD-ROMs like wizards.
The smart-as-a-tack client, turned to rigid paper pusher for the federal government under NASA.
The multi-talented Project Manager: PM’ing by day and creating by night. One of the smartest people she could ever look up to, from whom she learned the power of a strong team dynamic. They all thought the world of each other.
The Delivery Principal, one of her most inspirational and encouraging leaders. His true passion for their client, and the all-time dream project they afforded, drew her right along with it.
And, the couple who met and married while at the company. She knew the feeling – her own marriage occurred in the blissful dot-com boom days, before 9/11 changed everything. His other half lead her to her next interview and job, when the dot-com boom came crashing all down.
Such formative days, full of love. For job, for company, for coworkers, for the digital utopia.
20 Years Later, What Remains?
Nostalgia for places and interactions with people that at one point felt like “relationships”, but are now merely “associations”. A far away figment, relegated to a tenuous connection on LinkedIn or Facebook.
These are no longer people she talks to every day. Yet, somehow they remain as tiny, quiet links in her life roadmap. The internet acts merely as a memory tool: holding reminiscences of people one would normally never recall.
With the passage of so much time, humans stand silent in recollect. Like starry little gems twinkling in the night sky of life, fading as the universe continues to expand. Covered forever in cosmic dust, they just get further away from sight.
Is it possible that her childhood act of coding the universe was a premonition of this very moment? Delivering a rendering of a future, impossible to envision at that time?
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments.
"Pack it up, pack it in
Let me begin."
-- House of Pain
Friday
Mornings meant bouncing in, step-by-step to the music. Team members bopping by, hands in the hair, just don’t care. Everybody jump, jump (to the extent appropriate in an office setting, anyway).
The newcomer passes Bright’s desk, where the music emanates. Bright: he’s a designer of magnitude in the web shop, and bringer of daybreak levity. She pumps her fist, as a brown curl bounces on his bobbing head, and they exchange smiles. She thinks: It’s another great end to a great week in utopia.
But every day felt like TGIF day here. You felt it when you heard it. But even without musical accompaniment, you lived it in your mind: Jump up, jump up, and get down.
Bright’s supercharged musical selections echoed across half of the sprawling office floor, spreading smiles and giggles. Coworkers mingled and visited, making happy hour plans. Ample time existed to enjoy the moment, given Friday meetings were not a “thing”. Deliverable due dates were few and far between and a sprawling weekend lay ahead.
A light load paired with a perpetual friendly atmosphere made this late ‘90s hot digital consultancy into a work utopia. An environment of glass, blonde bamboo surfaces, high-rise views from North Dallas to Downtown, and bright yellow walls adorned with whiteboards. Talented and on-trend people took their positions on beanbags, fiddling with legos, and planning to take their pick of upscale restaurants for lunch.
In fairness to work ethic, some readied themselves for their next kickoff, anticipating the needs of their team of 30. Well prepared agendas and project plans stood ready to take command and mobilize a versatile group. But the most important question?: how many snacks to procure for their colossal conference room.
Others arranged travel to their client sites, all expenses paid, to engage on entirely new web projects – rich with lessons learned. Such as, the importance of preparation and roles & responsibilities definition before the plane landed. Alas, the lack of a “meeting before the meeting” at times became evident, during rocky on-site project starts. Live and learn!
Still, the momentum remained tangible… yet the environment was extremely laid back at the same time.
This was Friday in the dot com utopian enclave. The Friday before it all changed.
Monday
On this day, no music blared its greeting. Instead, something unusual: the sound of Spanish language broken by static.
The newcomer enters the web shop floor, gourmet coffee in hand, blissfully virgin to what was to come. With each step, the unfamiliar words amid white noise grow louder, and increasing confusion raises the hairs on her neck.
Approaching the mystery, she witnesses a gathering of coworkers, standing rigid. Faces: worried. Body language: closed in shock. Some pace, others stand entranced. Still others ask questions to each other, as if there are answers.
“I’m going to try to pull up CNN.com,” she overhears Bright say. Another follows him to a computer.
Then she turns her head toward the source of the sound, where a dozen eyes in a tiny interior conference room remain transfixed. An old school TV stands just above their heads, on a mobile stand. Projecting a building, on fire. Debris and papers floating in the air like fluttering butterfly wings. People hurling themselves, limp, out of windows – as if salvation lie ahead. All accompanied by explanation in a language that no one could understand. Yet, the group suspects that no language would suffice to explain.
“CNN.com is down,” Bright’s sober voice responds nearby.
In this dot com boom era, the all-powerful internet is rendered frail for the first time: cracking under the strain of traffic. An office filled with powerful computers and web builders stand similarly feeble and useless. And so, the group steps deeply back in time, to childhood. When the cable bill wasn’t paid, and analog TV could only pick up the Spanish station and its undulating waves of grey noise.
She remains rooted to the spot, coffee growing cold, in horror at the images invading her eyes. In a wave of synchronicity, fresh fear blossoms: Would our building become the next target?
The momentum suddenly transforms, and the crowd’s weight shifts like vermin suddenly exposed to light. Grabbing laptops hastily, the group files out with scuttling feet, proceeding to cars and highways. A singular instinct rules her mind: to get to a place of safety, with access to information to decipher, in an attempt to make some sense of it. To get home.
A short drive later, she steps through her front door. The second tower falls as she sinks to the floor.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments. Where we you when it happened?
What was the moment? When we knew the web started to change? When westarted to transform along with it?
In the warehouse downtown, the unsung heroes worked away at building the web with utopic vision. Days passed into years. Their scrappy thrive operated in a world scarcely recognized today: before Facebook and Google, but where Apples sheathed transparent teal plastic whirred aplenty. And discarded PC towers started to pile in a corner.
Clients evolved. Their sapling online brochureware grew encased in ever-growing tree-ring layers. A game of skin and reskin, where the bones of rainbow bars and grey slate panels grew covered in the fleshy pulp of proper navigation. Animated gifs stripped away like outgrown tree bark, replaced with a new layer of Flash. Increasingly advanced design gobbled higher internet speeds, and grew yet another tree ring. The widest tree ring to form so far?: dynamic functionality.
The builders themselves evolved in their warehouse… sprouting new thinking like hydras. Talk started anew online: an eruption that never stopped. AOL AIM gave way to ICQ, opening up a whole world of users known by only numbers and aliases. Communities sprung up, where in-depth and satisfying discussion bloomed around topics of common interest. Search revealed the breadth and depth of unifying facts and productive exchange available online, without monopolistic narrowing.
This unique and fleeting moment was Web 2.0. When the foundation shook at the Rainbow Bar, and at increasing internet velocity, “Home” as we knew it approached its crumbling death.
It set the stage for a future breed, that would split the trees open and upturn their roots: Social Media. Where communities toppled in the MySpace and Facebook celebration of self. This future held not just an evolution of technology, but of the people themselves, and their behavior.
Ways of working during “Web 2.0” evolved as well. For a time, web agencies reveled in “team building” activities, and the warehouse dwellers were no different. Every Friday, a game of “Pass The Ball” filled the afternoon. The premise was simple: say how you’re feeling and pass the ball. Sometimes, players were asked to answer other similarly innocuous questions. And got paid to do it.
The problem?: it became an oh-so-repetitive distraction from bringing our utopian internet vision to life.
For a few weeks, Bone asked: “Could we do something different this week?” He even suggested a few team building activities with reasonable legs. But somehow every week, Boss did not change. He had firm ideas of what was “right”: a vision of an elevated way to run his web agency.
And so, the game proceeded as it had for months prior… the ball passed once again.
But today would be different. Just as Web 2.0 stood transforming the internet as we knew it, Bone stood against the 285th ball pass. He slammed the perky beach wall into the floor, where it enjoyed a pretty good bounce.
“This is stupid!,” Bone shouted. “I’m not playing anymore!” With that, he stomped out of the room.
With a head of steam, then Presto followed. “And I said, don’t call me Presto anymore!,” his words spat at Boss, and out he went.
Their words hung in the air in the now-awkward emptying space. It was… team building gone bad. The group never expected to witness such an outburst for, in effect, being paid to do nothing but toss a ball. But some remained driven by a higher Web purpose, and this frivolous time waster was not for them.
For those who remained in the room, the ball-pass continued with complacency… Let’s get it over with.
Yet in ways as broad as Web 2.0 itself, and as nuanced as your coworker next in line for the ball pass, transformation remained clear and accelerating.
Lessons Learned: Listen to your people when they have ideas. Or at least, get creative and change it up on your own, before your “team building” morphs into a dumpster fire.
For those still building and experiencing the changing web… just wait. We’re still Shaking Up the Rainbow Bar, and maybe there are still a few utopian moments left for that ‘ol Web of ours.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments.
No, this is not some seedy porn site, nor a sordid online romance.
This is the President of the United States.
Most web workers of the 1990s “remember where they were” when the Clinton Investigation Report dropped. In our case, the story is set at the digital startup in the musty, old apartment.
For months in advance, news teased the forthcoming treasure trove of sleazy details about a once respected position: President. It was the very first time the world drove heavy demand for a piece of online content.
At a click of a button, the roughly 100-page, dense PDF instantly made its way to computers across the land.
Inside, tales of the sexual escapades of a sitting President with an Intern. Everyone in the office spent the afternoon pouring over it while sipping smoothies: the irresistible “train wreck” syndrome. And heck, it was just plain, juicy reading.
The Oval Office. The cigar. Hiding out under the desk. The rendezvous in the closet near the office. And above all, the Blue Dress.
We didn’t realize it at the time, but a milestone in digital history had arrived.
It was the first time human beings were destroyed online.
And, it destroyed the decorum around leadership and government as well.
It was pure and perfect fodder for all the Gen Xers working in digital at the time: the notoriously cynical and sarcastic. It played right into what we were looking for — more proof that our so-called leaders did not deserve reverence.
But the online landscape evolved quickly to attack not just the lofty. Now on a widespread basis, we continue to grapple with the online-people-destruction-machine today.
Consider this: you no longer need a 100-page report to invoke chaos on your fellow human being. You just need a few choice words on social media. It isn’t even that hard: no “investigation” needed. Let’s just call every social media post “mini-PDFs”.
Our culture now makes this commonplace online, across all walks of life and all levels of society. Tearing down, ridiculing, making a fool, censoring, and outright destruction of livelihoods, for beliefs deemed unpopular or undesirable.
If there’s something good to be said, perhaps the PDF served to dispel some myths in the process.
But it was the first of many destructive acts to come in the Digital Deliria.
As always, I hope you enjoyed this commentary.
Please “like” if you did on social media (@DigitalDeliria), share, and post your comments as well.
A metaphysical practitioner of peace and love. A hippie guru legitimized by a foundation of past life recall. The halo-wearer of Aquarius-Age books in print.
Ironically, the man of many names actually lived his life as a passive aggressive (but mostly aggressive) madman. As evidenced this fine morning at our digital startup, by the sound of page after page rolling off the fax machine.
Oh, not again. I eyed the machine. My boss nervously poked his head around the corner, peering with wide pupils at the rattling appliance.
The fax machine: an apropos medium for a writer. We lived at the dawn of the internet, yet email just would not do. Paper sent over the wire provided tangibility, something you could not just ignore. Heck, the machine remained tied up for 45 minutes just receiving one of the kook’s epic diatribes. That made it even more intimidating. You could nearly detect the smell of pseudo-legalese fodder hanging in the air, as acerbic words spilled onto the pages.
It is amazing that “fax” still exists today, notably in our broken medical, insurance and financial sectors, despite our seemingly advanced technological state! But I digress… back to our client, the Faxing King of the 1990’s...
At his core, he was an author extraordinaire. A well-known and prolific writer of metaphysical books, that still remain as cornerstones of new age philosophy today. Ironic then, that a man in the business of being “fun loving and spiritual” was equally prolific in sending us 10-page faxes ripping us up and down.
Words of bitter criticism, hatred, blame, despair, depression – all flowered from the page in copious quantity. Manic adjectives flourished with little or no actual requests. The overflowing, demonic rants only served to destroy us.
We preferred to respond like normal human beings to these communiques. First: have a stiff drink. Then, place a return phone call. Mustering our calm, we’d carefully discuss the issues raised in the fax.
The only faxes we sent in return? Invoices. Approaching the machine with an invoice in-hand required a straightening of the spine, a deep breath, and stiff brace stance (for fear of what we might receive in return). We cringed and pressed “send”, innocently begging for sweet lifeblood to keep our digital startup going, and to meet payroll.
We were simply people who were willing to serve our client’s website needs, bending over backwards to make them happy.
But we, the far-from-perfect, seemingly rarely did for this man. It’s true: we often deserved a firm critique. We were all trying to just “figure out” how to build this new thing called the web. Fails were all-too-common. But this was an unwarranted level of abuse rarely seen – before or since!
How could a sometime self-help guru, of past life wisdom and spouter of meditative benefits, could at once live a very different mindset when dealing with actual people? The lunatic was nearly perfect in his hypocrisy.
What motivated him?: Wanting it all now, and expecting it to be perfect. But he was asking for expertise that no one had. His website was one of the first ecommerce sites ever built… to promote and sell his books. This far predated Amazon.com, when no one had ordered goods online ever before.
However like many maniacs, this man deserves a story, given so many bittersweet lessons learned:
First: Peddling the fantasy of dreams and deeper meanings in life is more prevalent and desired in this world than actually living them. Indeed: for most, it’s just about the hustle. And hustle he did: building on folks’ hopes for a deeper life roadmap, and serving it up on a platter through his books (without actually living his own gospel).
As such, matters of the spirit aren’t well-addressed by the preach of fallible human beings.
In addition: on earth, “not all is as it seems”.
And most importantly: when you’re down and “getting those faxes”, never give up! Thicken that skin to the nay-sayers… they’re all around, ready to tap your energy. Don’t give in to it. Keep moving forward.
I still value my life lessons from this madman. 🙂 And… he was the first, but not the last teacher!
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did on social media @DigitalDeliria, share, and post your comments. What did you learn from your most unforgettable client/customer “interaction-gone-bad” moment?
Do you have personal goals? Like, maybe reading more? Technology may just be working against you. Pay attention to this for 4 mins and you might just learn what’s blocking you.
Digital Deliria is here to provide a nostalgic, fun reflection of our digital age. It’s also here to illuminate how technology is changing our brains in ways we don’t yet understand. A colleague just shared a stunning article that has insights into this.
30 Seconds
By this point in the article, you are probably fading away. Why is that?
It may take roughly ~4 minutes to get the fulfillment of reading. To earn a useful takeaway. To gain a sense of community, or know something more deeply. Or simply enjoy a good feeling, if nothing else.
But why can’t we pay attention for more than 30 seconds?
According to a former Google employee, the tech industry has turned our attention into an economy. The fight for our attention means more competing content, and thus the creation of smaller and smaller bits of content.
It’s not a surprise then, that the “byte sized” goodness provided online has conditioned us to have a limited attention span (~30 seconds).
Why Read On?
I’m with you. I spent my free time consuming tiny bits of social media for years, like a goldfish in a vast sea.
Until I changed my mind. I reset my goals and rechanneled that wasted time into writing and creating this website.
This site’s goal? — simply to brighten your day.
Another very real goal — to reclaim our attention spans. For me: reclaim mental focus, diligence and perseverance for more than 30 seconds by writing. For you: help regain your attention span by reading for more than 30 seconds.
Now you know… now you’re in it with me. Welcome to the Big Experiment.
How Can We Regain Our Attention & Focus?
It’s a bargain — if you read, I’ll write, and we’ll both get some our attention span back as a result.
Once a week, for 4 minutes, read a story. On this site or anywhere else – just select something to READ. Consider it an exercise for your attention muscle.
Will you take on the challenge? Does it go to far to say, it might help save your minds?
Will We Win?
For now, web stats show that we lost the battle.
But every week is a new opportunity on this site, with every new bit of content posted here. Maybe then, we’ll win the war?
Write on… Read on…
And be sure to watch the video on this page (“The Attention Economy”). If you do, you’ll see how the technology giants are changing our behavior to their advantage. Time to push back and accomplish what we want in our lives! 🙂
Pushing the tiny circular knob harder and harder to the right, left, up or down was an irresistible impulse. A pure instinct. An unstoppable obsession. Was it unreasonable then to expect the screen to actually respond to the force of approximately 2 elephants emanating from our pint-sized fingerstips? That the corkscrew wire, bridging from the console to the TV, would somehow convey my urgency? That indeed the character, gun or bullet would move farther and faster as a result of my pressure?
Apparently not.
Thus began the intense disconnect between my mind and the technological reality of these new things called “video games”.
Not only that, but aspects of play simply defied childhood logic. For example, imagine the shape of a thumbtack, with a flat top and an angular edge. Next, blow it up to 5 times its size and place it atop a big rectangular box with a keypad including numbers 0-9. (Note: What these numbers where for, who knows. They were never used.) Then, make this whole disjointed menagerie the means for tiny kids’ fingers to actually play the game.
Such was the Colecovision “joystick”.
Decidedly non-ergonomic.
A “joystick” bringing joy is a misnomer to the highest degree. Soon the angular edge of the large thumbtack knob made a painful red indent in the side of your thumb. Next, your palm (having maintained a vice grip on the harsh plastic rectangle) started to burn, then throb, then cramp.
Why was this the case?: Extended periods of time in high states of nervousness, and lack of synchronization between your rapid-firing synapses and game responsiveness.
Getting Hooked on Video Games
How then do we become hooked on video games for a lifetime, such that the current culture finds gaming and related virtual escapism perhaps more compelling than reality today?
Well, I didn’t. To me, game play was extremely frustrating and anxiety-inducing. Take a game like “Venture”, for example. To have the monster ghost come at you through the walls, accompanied by its utterly petrifying sound, while you are bound by those same walls and stuck purely because of a lack of joystick responsiveness… it was a horror relived in my nightmares.
Or a game like Carnival, where you tense up as soon as you hear the quacks of ducks coming down to eat all of your bullets, thanks again to the ridiculous controller… it turns an otherwise pleasant game into a duck-infested anger-generator.
“Play” like this felt more like “obsessive insanity” to me. Where winning was the result of super-human hand strength, mental perseverance, luck, or some combination thereof.
So, though my life continued through the Nintendo and Sega eras and beyond, my video gaming days generally ended in the Atari era. To this day, Centipede and Pac-Man are the only two games where I can put other players to shame.
But it was not without some formative memories.
Video Game Memories
The graphics on the box were cooler than the game.
Consider my very first experience with video games, on the fully digital version of Odyssey. A close family friend and his wife had purchased this state-of-the-art game console, and set it up in his small apartment in the Chicagoland area. One wintry evening, I was allowed to play the game.
I remember little about the game itself, other than the graphics were the coolest thing ever seen. (Colored dots on a screen went a long way back then.) What I remember most is being absorbed heavily until I heard some sort of sound behind me. Perhaps it was a laugh? Whatever it was, it pierced my attention enough to whip my head around to see my parents seated on the living room couch with their friends.
With my probing gaze, suddenly the mood changed. An embarrassed look crossed over my parent’s faces. A moment later, perhaps something in their hands was hastily hidden between the overstuffed brown couch cushions. My parent’s friends just grinned like Cheshire cats.
What were these responsible adults doing, I wondered? I was about to pop up off the shag carpet and find out, when I was told dismissively to “go back to playing your game now”. Clearly, this was for adults only, and the secrets were not for me to know.
Resigned, I went back to the game but not without a distinct sense of exclusion. Soon, I was further blanketed by the isolating action of playing the game – an isolation both self-selected (in that I chose to continue playing) and forced (because I felt no choice to do anything else).
This was the first time, but not the last, that I felt isolated by technology.
It didn’t take much to entertain.
On the flipside, I have joyous memories of playing videogames with my fun-loving Uncles. One Uncle had Atari (set up in a kitchen, of all things, again in a Chicagoland area apartment). He had a wild west shooting game called “Outlaw”. Oh, how we laughed when a guttural “oohph” came out of the pixelated cowboys as they were shot and subsequently fell on their butts. Or perhaps these were sound effects added by my Uncle for more hilarity… I can’t remember which!
My other Uncle had “Time Pilot”, a Colecovision game. The graphics by that time had advanced, and we loved flying different historical-looking planes around obstacles like zeppelins. I felt so at-home: this tiny girl sitting on the floor next to her vibrant, broad-shouldered Uncle… learning from his deft plane maneuvers and eagerly awaiting my two-player chance.
These games have fond connotations for me of relationships and experiences, much in the same way that you associate a sweet song with a person and place.
In short, I am of the video game generation and fun was aplenty. Yet, I still jettisoned myself away, as if my space ship broke out of its fixed frame in Galaga and flew off into deep space.
Why? — My anxiety-inducing early experiences with the technology. It is interesting now how games and virtual environments hold such strong cultural significance with current generations. (Think: what would make you get a tattoo of one game character, or name your second child after another one, except for utter obsession… or at minimum, huge enjoyment of gaming?)
This video game excommunicado thinks escapism and a sense of “not growing up” holds sway here. Or, maybe the young’uns just got better joysticks!
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
Please “like” if you did, share, and post your comments.
With so much content online, to consume our time day-in-and-day-out, why in the world do we need this website?
Well, it dawns on me no one is really talking about our shared experience of growing up in an increasingly digital world. I mean, I looked! I sought out this information and found nothing of real note. (If I missed something interesting, please comment!)
But from what I can tell, people are just not talking about how digital – something once new and undiscovered – is now transforming into a digital history. A nostalgic pixel quilt of the careers, people and technology that comprises our digital existence.
A Digital History
So I decided to venture back. Reveling in the nostalgia of our first technology experiences. Revisiting the wild and often hysterical days of working at a hot digital ad agency. Building the first websites. Remembering the pitfalls and successes of young entrepreneurs like me, with a wide open and fresh playing field of the internet, just out there “figuring it out”. I’m thinking back to rainbow bars and beveled button days here! And, across nearly 25 years of experience in this business.
So, I’m starting this site. The Tales From Digital Deliria are ready… no, itching!.. to be told. It’s time to let them out of their cage! 🙂
So What is Digital Deliria?
It is:
Stories from the heady days of the dawn of the internet (and its builders, like me). They’re challenging, sometimes bittersweet, and often hilarious! (Office zen gardens, ping pong tables, and crazy clients, anyone?)
Facing the reality that the internet never became the enlightening utopia we thought we were building. (So let’s indulge in a little nostalgic reminiscing about the time before this dawned on us, OK? Yeah, we did have youthful dreams about changing the world for the better back then. And just maybe, the dreams are still within our reach?…)
Trying to figure out how all this digital is affecting our brains… our existence! (In other words: the “deliria”, that I hasten to guess, digital literally causes.) Let’s explore how our collective technology experience shapes the mind, the brain, and thought processes in ways we don’t yet understand but are likely significant. e.g. Think about this the next time you see a kid in a stroller with head buried in their iPad.
Please stay tuned here for more. And “like” if you did, share, post your comments, or give me your feedback. Would like to hear your stories of living in the Digital Deliria too!
As always, I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened your day.
