NextNow Member Blog

Jeff Saperstein, Charlotte Ziems and I were the hardy souls that went for a delightful hike on Mt. Tamp today…it was drizzly but perfectly beautiful.

Living Online
By Claudia L’Amoreaux
Online learning consultant

I’ve been thinking about all the decisions I make routinely in my life online—and a great deal of my life these days is lived online. Last night when I was doing some research on MySpace for this column, I logged into MySpace to see what a few of my younger friends were up to. In this blurry realm of online “friendship,” it’s important to distinguish that these are friends who have grown up with me…I was at one of their births. We see each other regularly. I put my one young friend’s name in the Find a Friend field and found his site on MySpace. A blinking text icon told me he was online. I could have IM-ed him, but I was too busy and I’m sure he was busy. Living online…

I bought my first modem (a 2400 baud model – remember those?) in 1985. I had one email account. Today I have five websites, 2 blogs and at least 20 email accounts, each with a purpose. My life online in 2006 is amazingly complex compared to those early days. It’s a complexity I frequently take for granted. On a daily basis I encounter a constant stream of choices and discriminations that I do automatically while navigating in cyberspace. Our kids are faced with this complexity of decisions and choices and discriminations, and they do it automatically too. That’s why I’ve started to look at what some of these decisions and choices are and how I make them.
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