Monday, February 9, 2015

Technology: A Love-Hate Relationship


I’m in New Orleans for a treasured aunt’s funeral, sitting in my 88-year-old mother’s kitchen, some 650 miles away from my office. It’s four in the morning. I’m connected online via my mother’s landline. We make do with what’s available. My company’s CEO is in Switzerland for a big business conference that will be livestreamed over the internet. The plan is for people at the event to livetweet, and I will retweet them. The program will last one hour.
Nothing goes according to plan. The people in Switzerland forget to livetweet. The livestream will work only herky-jerky over the landline. The company is announcing a big initiative, and we have to livetweet it. I feel the panic rising.
Yes, we make do with what’s available. I pirate the next-door neighbor’s wifi, pull up the livestream, and begin to tweet a meeting 5,000 miles from where I’m sitting. No one knows that I’m not in the room in Switzerland. And by following the stream via the meeting’s hashtag, I can periodically retweet photos and what others are recording. I end up with 45 tweets in an hour. I quickly assemble the tweets into a narrative flow and post them on the company’s blog.
To continue reading, please see my post today at The High Calling.


Photograph by George Hodan via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission. 

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