I have shredded, slack rubber bands lying all around my apartment because I can’t bear to throw them away. I use one for months at time, giving it prime location on my left wrist instead of a watch, like I measure my time by how worn the rubber band is rather than by the spins of a dial, until it squeaks every time I pull it taught, threatening to break as I fill it full of unruly brown hair. And when they no longer can handle the wild of my hair I still cannot pitch them out. I use them to fasten cables together, to group tapecassettes together, to keep my cord from falling behind the desk, anything but death. And each and every one, to their dying day, holds on as tight they can to whatever bits of my life need sorting out, bringing thing together and keeping them stable for as long as possible. An this, this great contribution to society, the good that rubber bands have done, is so significant, that even when they snap into pieces and cry out for death, I cannot throw them away. I put them in a drawer and pull them out from time to time to play games, because I will always believe that the things that hold your life together are worth keeping around as long as possible.

Recently I was asked to take a trip down middle school memory lane for a writing piece. This is what I came up with, a sad and strangely unchanged image of an often overlooked nine-year-old who never really grew out of tube socks and braces:

I was the shortest kid in my class for not just one but eight years. To those unused to name calling and all manners of middle school tormenting, eight years doesn’t mean my status as carny was eventually accepted as fact and the jokes ultimately retired. Instead the taunting didn’t stop for just short of a decade, until Lydia Simmons (who is incidentally still legally a midget) replaced me as Empress of the Vertically Challenged. For one glorious year.

After Lydia moved off to boarding school one year later to reign as supreme little-woman elsewhere, the teasing recommenced almost immediately. I couldn’t figure it out. Sure, I wore glasses, and yeah, I liked fantasy novels, and so what if I spent free period talking to the biology teacher? I could be neat…I mean cool too! Once I was written up for detention, although admittedly, it was for reading a fiction book in the library during non-fiction period. I wore Chuck Taylors though, even if they were two sizes too big and hand-me-downs from my older sister that made my walk as embarrassing as my run. But I did get in a fist fight once. Behind the gym I pushed Jay Kelley because he pulled my ponytail one too many times. Of course he did proceed to give me a week’s worth of knuckle sandwiches, but fighting just had to be an automatic popularity booster. Right?

You get the picture. I was one unfortunate ball of friendless, bookwormy humiliation. I wish I could tell you I was no longer awkward, no longer the shortest kid in my class, and no longer had my ponytail pulled, but unfortunately I cannot. I am still all kinds of awkward and socially lost, all of my boyfriends seem to be at least a full foot taller than me (regardless of whether they themselves are tall or not), and from time to time someone does reach out and give my hair a good, solid yank. However, it’s not all tears and torture anymore. Now at least no one writes me up for reading fiction in the library.

I recall a grade school pow-wow about jetpacks, where we were all promised hovercars and flyways. I remember NASA predicting everyone would eat fortified dehydrated space food grown from tubes of distilled water. I can still hear my third-grade classmates talk about which power was ultimate: teleportation or time travel. Now the year is 2008 and although we are still without jetpacks, I’ve spent the last decade of my life learning about the dream products that did get made for mass consumption. Consumer electronics is a field so unpredictable and fast-paced that as quickly as I learn about the newest and greatest, it changes. Some of the products out there are truly remarkable; even something as simple as a cellular telephone can only be described as revolutionary. And it doesn’t end there. Perhaps The Onion puts it best in the mock article “Earthquake Sends Japan Back To 2147.” In some arenas, we are so far ahead of ourselves that I can’t help but wonder if the novelty of innovative circuitry gives way to anything more substantial or if it is just that: novelty. Japan is perhaps an extreme version of the technology infestation, obsession, fetish, whatever you want to call this problematic bubble unique to first world society, but even in our own culture here in the United States, we can see some of Tokyo and Akihabara’s preoccupation with the latest gadgets and gizmos rubbing off. Among the hordes of Southern Californian socialites, you would be hard-pressed to find one without a trusty blackberry or iphone or whichever consumer product is the hottest. The broke college kids still manage to get by with a pay-as-you-go plan. In fact, one step on the Metro Rapid will tell you just how many people in Los Angeles can’t live without their best mobile sidekicks.

We are so far ahead of ourselves that I can’t help but wonder if the novelty of innovative circuitry gives way to anything more substantial.

I’ve a few friends here and there still walking around a city this big and this cutting edge without mobile phones. The oddest part of such a claim to fame lies not in how difficult they are to reach — on the contrary these pager-less are quite reachable — but instead on how reliable they are. Having a mobile ingrains in us this unusual belief that because we are constantly plugged in, certain acts that would otherwise be considered uncouth are suddenly perfectly acceptable. When we can phone others and ask where they are and what they are doing at any given moment the need to be reliable and impeccable no longer exists. Spontaneity is made easier, yes, but it also slips into the realm of acceptable behaviour for me to be grossly late if I can explain to you where I am and why I am late while you’re waiting.

Having a mobile ingrains in us this unusual belief that because we are constantly plugged in, certain acts that would otherwise be considered uncouth are suddenly perfectly acceptable.

In many ways, we are beginning to replace conversation with mobile devices, transforming face to face relationships into faceless ones. The instant messenger is akin to the passing conversation the way a walk in the park and a long chat have been replaced by emails and blogrolls. But instead of interaction, we have reaction, and these reactions are ultimately unsatisfying. The number of contacts in your buddy list certainly doesn’t correspond to how many buddies you actually have, and when transitioning from the cyberworld to the real world, this disparity is upsetting and leaves us feeling discontent. On a telephone or instant messenger we are unable to look at who we are conversing with; as such we are only getting half of the person in an insufficient form of communication. Furthermore, the infrastructure of these mediums for communication does not support any variation from friend to friend. Relationships vary greatly from acquaintances to soulmates, and the natural human manner of dealing with these differences is almost completely transparent. That is to say we don’t notice how we speak differently to different types of friends. Yet on a mobile phone, the only way to indicate deeper friendship is to talk longer or more often. This is not a meaningful relationship with depth, but instead breadth of surface.

So why then do we continue to hold on to these false forms of friendships? There is an underlying human desire for connection with others, for social interaction and ultimately acceptance. It’s the driving force that kept us trying in our awkward middle school years, and although some of us grow up, we never really change. The truth is, the problems one person has communicating will carry over all forms of communication. The issues are ultimately the same, we’re just tackling smaller and smaller portions, distracted by the ability to edit our own profiles and upload our own photographs. The ability to edit oneself is the ultimate distraction because the very idea is so fundamentally appealing to this never-ending desire for connection. By plugging into the grid, we are able to spend our days in the matrix so to speak, exactly as we wish to be. This freedom is not afforded to users of the real world. So you will find fake ids and false profiles and spam and scams and registered pedophiles, but the digital world holds such promise simply because it asks, “why shouldn’t we be able to make our own identity? Why shouldn’t it be so easy?”

The ability to edit oneself is the ultimate distraction.

I have found those not plugged into the great grid of communication surrounding us all must rely on an older paradigm of interaction that is increasingly out of place in the modern world. There is a compelling case that these are somehow truer people, and because my friendships with them are based on real, live interaction that cannot be edited, that perhaps these relationships are in a sense truer relationships. I have neither the privilege nor the burden of knowing them any other way; I can only know their favourite films by asking, not by looking up an obscure profile. On a macro scale, this type of interaction removes a great deal of assumption and increases openness. These synchronous relationships do not confine the definition of “knowing a person” to a series of forms or favourites to be filled in. Yet my friends without mobile phones and social network accounts are stamped with the mark of being “off the grid,” a scarlet letter that can actually be redeeming. They make their own rules, and they show up where they say they will be when they say they will be there. Moreover, the oh so common element of casual “let’s get together” that is often more a nicety than a serious suggestion is completely eliminated with these mates and the friendship reduced to a single switch. The relationships we pursue are never mistaken; either we are friends or we are not.

Yet I am just one person, and there are many more in the world free from mobiles. I’m sure some such exemplary individuals chose to live without the promise of instant and constant contact for that very reason: the desire to be free from the 24/7 mentality. This is another issue altogether. As a matter of preference and values, it would be futile to argue either for or against such extreme connectivity; it’s like arguing cats versus dogs, everyone has a strong opinion but neither is any more or less valid than the other. However, it is important to note the distinction between being able to stay connected not just any but every time, and the assumption that you have to. Just because the options the mobile phone provides exist does not require anyone, on either end of the phone line, to cede them. Yet for some reason, we often forget that we control our mobile devices, not the other way around.

Note the distinction between being able to stay connected not just any but every time, and the assumption that you have to.

It should be abundantly clear by now that at times I feel so much of our society is at the mercy of the grid, but among the many seemingly disappointing shortcomings of the plugged-in lifestyle, there are a few diamonds in the rough. With the influx of mobile devices, digital conversion, and binary computing integration made possible by technological advances, there has also been a great deal of innovation to the digital world, innovation that is threatening to redesign how we process and present data. How many times do we look up jetlag on wikipedia.com only to end up at groundhog day and the origin of the HImalayas several hours later. How many applications live solely in the nebulous mesh that is the internet? Movement of our thoughts into the cloud, organisation based on horizontal relation rather than vertical hierarchy, seems daunting only because it is a harbinger of future data design. Edward Tufte may flout graphs and charts but the fact remains that information graphics are so difficult to design because the human brain thinks with an uncalculable, unstructurable methodology. More and more the organisation of information will transition into the cloud until the workings of the digital become completely invisible. The few who currently understand the controlled chaos that is the inner workings of a computer will become endangered in the way a sunday night chat has become nearly extinct. And so we in the digital world are left with a depressing choice: what makes another human relationship important? Are we friends because a webpage says so, or are we friends because your number is in my mobile?

Welcome!  After a good deal of experimentation, I have finally launched unlikelysquiggle.com, my personal website and online portfolio. What you are reading right now is what I have ceremoniously dubbed the datalogue, a catalogue of my writings and creative works. I hope you enjoy the site, enjoy the reading, and come back soon!