I am currently working on a commission entitled On The Day the World Ends for Volti, an adventurous, cutting-edge choir based in San Francisco. Setting three poems about death is causing me to think about dead composers, especially those living in the 19th century and earlier. Sure, they had their share of problems (disease, no copy machines, no copyright issues, etc.), but I wonder if they had fewer distractions.

Although I want to stay connected to everyone I know, I feel like the methods we use to connect are getting out of hand and becoming more splintered.

Aside from meeting in person, we have telephones (often mobile and landlines, or increasingly, just mobile), email (usually via multiple email accounts and social networking sites like Facebook), texting, faxing, instant messaging and multiple answering machines, not to mention Twitter, which I've mentioned in an earlier post. Isn't this all a bit much?

What are really annoying are email accounts. Much as been written about how email is passé, especially with younger generations, but I like to archive certain Facebook conversations, and proprietary systems like social networking sites make this unnecessarily difficult. As I always like to point out, our children will eventually laugh at us, that we watched black and white TV, that we used records, and especially that we used this thing called the internet, an increasingly cobbled-together system that is really multiple webs in one.

Really, I am just hoping that someday, everything will be more unified. Too much time is wasted with so many different non-connected systems. I know it will get better soon, but soon is not soon enough.

What do you think? Leave your answer below...

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