Lost in Space
Have you ever felt that the world of new technology is beyond you? Have you been thrilled to have mastered Facebook only to find that 1. Your kids won’t ‘friend’ you and are appalled at the thought that you could have any access to their thoughts/activities! And 2. that in fact, FB is only the tip of the iceberg and this new found interaction of yours is passé to many and while they maintain their FB life, they have a whole lot more lives going on out there too! Well, don’t feel alone and don’t feel that you have to seek the help of a passing 10 year old to guide you through the maze – the question is – do we need to spend 24-7 attached to technology?
In our modern, busy world, even here on Rarotonga or anywhere in the Cook Islands that we can access the web, there are more and more of us getting ‘lost in space’. We are on our emails all day at work and that usually continues once we reach home; we have our Facebook profiles and stories to maintain and then there is Twitter for short bursts or information, Flickr for showing off the photographs that aren’t on Facebook, not to mention maintaining your business contacts and credentials through LinkedIn and your music persona on MySpace – phew! It is a wonder that we have any time to live other than virtually! A quick calculation of memberships of these sites brings a total of 1,260,500,000 users (albeit with crossovers) to the Internet each day excluding those of us on Skype etc.
If I am sounding like a Luddite that wants to throw out technology then I want to assure you that nothing is further from the truth! I suppose that I am conscious of this because I am one of those multiple users above, using Google as my instant gratification encyclopaedia, posting my guerrilla marketing of the Cook Islands photographs on FB whenever I can and have recently discovered Pinterest which is a highly addictive online equivalent of a vision board or scrapbook which….no I’ll let you discover it yourself!
I suppose that I have come to realise that connection is important but we tend to be living entirely through our fingers on a keyboard not connecting through people and the beauty that surrounds us here. As I sit on my deck typing this, listening to the waves on the reef and drinking in the sparkle of the turquoise lagoon, I feel compelled to tell you to step away from the keyboard every so often, look up, listen, smell the fragrances that surround us and the people we love and indulge a little in the best social media – conversation, hugs and laughter!
Don’t allow yourself to get ‘Lost in Space’ - for those that remember the show there was ‘Danger! Will Robinson’! It is a brilliant tool that makes our life so much easier and more informed but is no substitute for the real thing! -Carmel Beatie

Herald Issue 608 21 March
- Terms of one China Policy document should be reviewed
- Pacific Media Assistance Scheme Seeks Innovation
- Successful NZ visit by PM
- Rerekura Teaurere New Climate Change Coordinator
- News Briefs