Suck the marrow out of the meatspace bone

(click to play the soundtrack of this post)

Digital Attraction

I quite fancy David Armano's blog. This is full of ideas and nice visual assets about design, user experience and web 2.0.It was strange to see this touching post though. I probably am wrong but this sounds to me like self-persuasion : "hey real life is cool : I can see, I can feel, I can touch, I can smell, I can communicate". But, then, there is digital attraction he cant resist : "OK, I think I'm ready for work now. :)" is the way this blog post ends, rather sadly.

It could well be a misinterpretation but the line between "Working" and "Being connected" becoming more and more blurry, it sounds to me as if he was saying : "Okay, I just had enough of real life to write a blog post with, now give me my electronic hit back".

Meatspace Vs Myspace

In this great post Danah Boyd reckons that "the digital is complementing (and complicating) the physical". I would tend more and more to think the opposite and would swap "digital" and "physical" in that very sentence. There has been some kind of shift, here.

Most of us spend the day connected for work. But now we also are connected for about everything as Fred is putting it. The unplugged portion of our day tends to reduce drastically, so does our life in the real world, subsequently.

It's as if whatever happens in our real lives should feed the electronic ones. There is this post on 37 signals regarding Designer Jane Fulton Suri book Thoughtless Acts advocating for observing regular peope doing regular things to improve as designer (may I disgress a bit here : the casual way girls tie their hair back with a pencil is so strangely glamorous - pic from Jane Fulton book).

There is a pretty similar post from DA. Sounds to me like : suck the marrow out of the meatspace bone to make the real life a part of the digital one.

This is a bit of a concern for me. Seeing this post from David allowed me to take a step back and question myself. How do you fellow bloggers feel about that ? Do you think that your electronic and real lives are balanced ? As far as I am concerned, well I wonder.