At home with the lights out

Technology is wonderous. Not wonderful, mind you, but certainly wonderous. I think that if one wants to live peacefully, mindfully, real-ly, then technology can be a tremendous distraction. Ninety percent of technology makes our lives easy, or--never mind easy--makes our lives possible. Any of you old-timers remember what it was like to take a long car trip to a place you'd never been, without Mapquest, GPS, a phone, for goodness sake? Anyone remember standing in line, a literal line comprised of people, for tickets? Anyone remember having to carry cash? The remaining ten percent of technology, that stuff we refer to as "technology" in this context, generates ninety percent of the din. Blogs. Photo sharing. The mythical online community. Streaming video. Games. Toys. Widgets. Whatever.
We are obliged to be reasonably fluent in this new language. It is no longer enough to be able to help our patrons with basic survival stuff like job and apartment listings, printing tax forms and pay stubs, opening an email account, searching for information. Now we have to know our way around when it comes to that noisy, sexy ten percent. Is it really important to know about amusements like how to design your own trading card? Do we really care if this guy wants to rip off a bunch of music via Limewire and load it onto his iPod? Should we have to be up on the nuances of various social networking sites? Well, yeah. We're expected to. If we want to be good at our jobs, we have to.
Heaven help me, though, it is exhausting. Bombarded as we are with nifty new how-did-we-ever-live-without-these online "tools," I sometimes feel like an overstimulated child who needs a nap. It's all really, really cool, and surely we will never again want for distractions, but at the end of the we could be excused if we wanted to go home and sit in a quiet, dark room.