I decided not to allow comments to this blog because they can be too time consuming. If time is a problem, I could ignore them; but that is not in my nature. If someone sends me a meaningful message, then I feel I owe them a response.
As you can see by my frequency of posts here that I was probably right. My email is even worse, I have 27 "unanswered" messages and have been running about that for over a week. Each of these require some action on my part, paying a bill, visiting a web site, or responding to a friend or relative.
I think I understand the complaints of some users of the Genealogy Roundtable on GEnie when I was its sysop in the last century. They just didn't have time to check everyday if someone responded to their query nor did they have an evening to spare to participate in an online discussion. Worse yet, their monthly costs could mount up at $12 or $6 an hour, much of that "wasted" time at 1200 or 2400 bits per second.
Even though my online time is "free", I feel like my users did in the use of my own time. I, like you, am being constantly bombarded to participate in some forum or other. Companies want us to visit their forums to get answers to our problems rather than answer them specifically. Political and advocacy organizations want us to visit their sites and participate in the "discussion". Publicly traded companies want us to get annual reports online rather than as paper copies; how fast can you scan 100 pages online?
All of our creditors want us to pay online rather than by check. Let's see, two minutes to write a check and put it in an envelope, but five minutes to go to the site, log on, read the statement, enter the payment, verify the payment, submit the payment, and log off.
Let me end on a positive note. The Web provides a vast resource of reading material. I could not move from the New York Times to The Atlantic to local papers to newspapers around the world as fast, even if my library stocked all these publications. Second, if I find something I would like to save, I don't have to go to the copier with a stack of dimes for a single article. With a quick cut and paste I can save the file in a folder that fits, not in some physical overcrowder drawer, but in a tiny bit of space under my fingertips.
We've come a long way from the cards in and cards out when I started in computers 48 years ago. And we ain't seen nothing yet!
