While I can marvel at all the whiz-bang of modern electronic communication, I am also somewhat saddened. As instant messaging has boomed, the time for conversation has dwindled. At the ACR meeting, a spontaneous meeting with a colleague or old friend is a thing of the past. In a building that is a mile long and big enough to contain the Rose Bowl, bumping into friends has become a statistical rarity. When you do see someone you want to greet, he or she is likely to be running between sessions, frantically searching for Room 145, which is nestled in the outer reaches of a building across the street and down a long and twisty corridor.
As the size of ACR meeting has exploded, efforts at contact need planning and the orchestration of a staccato of email strings. “Let’s meet.” “How about 12:30?” “1 is better.” “Where?” “Renaissance lobby.” “See you.”
The Renaissance Lobby, however, is a dark and gloomy place and many a rendezvous there could be completed only with the coda of a cell phone conversation. “It’s 1:15.” “Where are you?” “In the lobby. I’ve been waiting for you.” “I can’t see you.” “I’m near the front desk. Turn around.” “Oh, I see you. You’re behind a plant.”
Reconnect the Map
Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling book entitled The World Is Flat, elevated the title into a mantra for our modern era of electronic communication. In this conceptualization, the flat world, linked intimately and immediately by myriad fiber optic networks, reorganizes life and work to promote unprecedented communication and cooperation that transcend national boundaries. To Friedman, the flat world is a good world.
I am as dependent on the flat world as anybody else is, but I miss the round world. At the ACR meeting, I missed seeing many of my friends. I exchanged far too few handshakes, kisses, and hugs, and my desire to finish a conversation with a close friend and say a proper farewell went astray as I became lost in the overwhelming expanse of the convention center.
While Friedman uses flat to signify closeness and proximity, the word has other much less positive meanings. Among its slew of definitions in Webster’s dictionary, flat can mean dull, lifeless, and insipid. Friedman doesn’t emphasize that danger of a flat world but it is omnipresent and lurking.
As a vehicle for communication, TR is old fashioned. It is a product of a bumpier and more variegated world and it will overflow with images, feelings, and personality. To enliven its pages and put a picture in the beautiful frame that Wiley has fashioned, TR needs you. It needs your ideas, opinions, advice, recollections, remembrances, questions, answers, cogitations, proclamations, and yes, even your shrieks and your rants.
