The stream

I don't know for sure when it was that I last heard anyone call the Internet "the information superhighway". I suspect though that it was Harry Smith on the CBS morning news about fifteen years ago. Or mebbe it was the first time I heard it called that. I honestly don't remember, but I do know that when he said it, I thought that it was made up language designed to explain something that needed no explanation for people actually making the trip.

Last night, in my sleep, I found myself dreaming about a different way of interacting with technology--the stream. In an intense, and very long, dream, I was moving thought my normal life but I was connected to information in a different way. At first it seemed sort of like I had one of those big screens that sorted through information in different ways--you know, like they used on CNN during the election--but the screen was desktop size and I sat in front of it. I spent a considerable amount of dream time making appointments to see people and doing workly things using the screen which seemed to be able to intuitively call forth all sorts of different features automatically when I had some task to input.

It felt like something new, but also something that was not much more than a calendar on steroids: time based, and interconnected with things like an address book, to do list, and email, but not much more. As I was realizing that, my mind wandered to another way of doing it, which at first seemed to have to do with getting more connectivity through a bigger pipe. I dreamt about going through a door and finding someone standing in a hallway that somehow circled the bits of my life. He was holding a big plug. It looked a little like the 220 thing-a-ma-bob that is on an electric stove.

As I considered plugging into this bigger thing, I suddenly realized that it was a false choice. That the real choice was whether I was going to choose to let the stream whirl around me, only faster and with more connections and continue to access it by sitting in front of a screen, or whether I was going to let go and become part of the stream with different bits of me swirling around connecting with different things in a way that was not time based--at least not in that march of time sort of way.

The choice was about accepting a different reality in which interactions happened that were relationship mediated. Different things could happen simultaneously and I could be fully present in all of them. There was no moving from Point A to Point B. Linear connections became inconsequential. It was a rejection of multi-tasking, which currently involves moving from one thing to another, and then coming back to the original task or two or three. In this new way of being I still had tasks but I did them simultaneously with whomever was involved. At the same time I was involved with a different group of people doing something else. When something I was doing with one group impacted the other group we all knew it and went from there.

I wasn't using the stream-as-tool, I was part of the stream itself.

In the dream, becoming part of the stream was an existential choice. I knew that if I joined the stream, it was the last decision I would make in the old time based way of looking at such things. Everything would change. I remember wondering about whether anyone I knew would be in the stream with me and wondering what it would feel like to be interacting with people who were still connecting in the old way.

I walked into the stream.