I thought it a little bit profound.  Not whats 'new' but whats 'next'
ehh.  Probably no more need for ever having imagination again.  Pity
our poor children, nothing left for them to invent :-)
By Bob Greene

(CNN) -- Did you set your clocks back this morning?

If you forgot, you may want to go ahead and do it now.

Don't feel like you're being rude; we'll wait right here for you.

There. You have now given yourself the illusion -- as all of us do,
every spring and autumn as
we adjust our clocks and watches -- that you are in control of the
concept of time.

But that's a battle that we all seem to have lost a while ago. Every
technological advance
fools us into thinking that we have conquered time, that we have made
it our servant. Yet there
is this nagging feeling that it is we who have somehow become enslaved.

We suspect that our time is not, in fact, our own -- that it is some
alien creature that has
overcome us and altered us. We are constantly, as if against our
wills, in a rush to be in a
bigger rush. So why, then, does each day's invisible finish line seem
farther and farther away?

The other morning, I was in an airport when I saw an artifact from a
dying era, something as
evocative, in its own way, as the crumbling edifices of ancient Rome.
The artifact in the
airport had been disabled, ready to be hauled off to the scrap heap.

Its name was printed upon it: "AT&T Public Phone 2000."

You may be familiar with the contraption. In the early 1990s, when
2000 still seemed distant
and exotic, AT&T started installing the things in airports across the
U.S. The AT&T Public
Phone 2000 was far more advanced than a traditional pay telephone. It
featured a glass screen,
which blinked madly at passing men and women, inviting them to come
hither. It featured a
keyboard. It had a wide bench seat.

The idea was that the business traveler with an extra few minutes
before his or her flight
could sit down, insert a credit card, and -- here was the magical part
-- send a written
message to friends and associates in other parts of the country.

They were big and bulky and undoubtedly expensive to produce, and soon
enough they became all
but useless because people now carry tiny personal versions of those
machines in their pockets.
Which is why the wiring had been cut on the AT&T Public Phone 2000
that I saw the other day,
and why it sat there in the terminal, unavailable for use.

Our ability to reach each other in a millisecond, and to reach the
world at large, has
progressed so rapidly that we didn't seem to fully notice as it happened.

One day we were walking down city streets making eye contact with each
other, taking in the
local scenery, and the next we were staring at the screens of our
hypnotic phones, receiving
real-time messages and breaking-news updates from people hundreds of
miles away. It was a
tradeoff we didn't exactly ask for. Yes, the concept of distance was
all but erased -- but so,
in a way, was the concept of place. We were sold the notion that we
could be anywhere, with the
tap of a key. What we only gradually began to recognize was that, by
being everywhere,
sometimes it felt like we were nowhere.

Any delay began to feel unacceptable. Most of us grew up accustomed to
having to wait for
letters in the U.S. mail; when e-mail made that largely unnecessary,
we told ourselves that the
new speed of electronic correspondence was satisfying and ideal. But
then came instant
messages, which were. . .well, instant. This was all supposed to save us time.

Yet do you feel as if time is something you have mastered? Do you
believe that you have many
more free hours to yourself now? Have the ever-sleeker-and-smaller
machines and the
ever-more-potent software cleared your schedule, made you a man or
woman of leisure?

Or do you sometimes worry that you are working for your handheld
communication device, instead
of the other way around?

"What's new?" has ceased to be a casual pleasantry, and has become an
urgent demand. Indeed,
the word "new" itself has lost its punch; in marketing campaigns, the
adjective "new" has
increasingly been tossed aside and replaced by the adjective "next."
"New" now seems somehow
old.

At family gatherings and get-togethers of friends, something is
happening that would have
seemed outlandish even a few years ago. People at the parties are
posting photos and videos of
the events on social networking sites even as the parties are still going on.

Thus, friends and acquaintances around the country and around the
world are looking at the
party pictures and videos and evaluating them before the party is even
over. And people who are
at the parties themselves, checking in on the same social network
sites, are looking at the
publicly posted pictures of the party they are still attending. It's
like a bizarre form of
proactive nostalgia for something that hasn't finished taking place yet.

Some day soon, even this will seem quaint and outmoded; some day soon,
this current ability to
be constantly in touch will feel creaky and broken-down, like the AT&T
Public Phone 2000 that
was ready to be carted out of the airport. Right around the next
corner -- someone is already
working on it -- the next generation of technology is almost ready,
with the promise of
compressing time and space in ways that will make us dizzy.

And yet: Has all of this increased your ability to take a deep breath,
to relax, to savor the
time that is available to you? Did all of the rushing deliver you to
someplace better?

Now. . .how did we get started on this?

Oh. Of course.

Did you set your clocks back this morning?

You don't want to let time get away from you

Cheers
Tommy