Ruminations on my Hometown Newspaper and Technology

From the age of 13 when my family moved to Somerset, Massachusetts (pretty much the last of a quite a few moves in my adolescent life), I read the Providence Journal on a daily basis. I admit that I most likely have a strong bias towards this newspaper since it was my first newspaper, just like a first love, my inky fingers testament to that love just as any lipstick kiss would have been. You could tell if I had answered the phone in the morning in the summer if there was an ink stain on it. Many mornings, I had smudges on my face, especially in the summer before I began working. How I loved when that paper switched to using ink!


When I when off to college in Amherst, I tried other papers and none really satisfied me. Besides, I was busy all of the time and it seemed like the free flimsy Daily Collegian was okay enough to quality as "reading the paper" daily. I also lived in the Boston area for about five years and read the Boston Globe daily. I grew very used to it and even liked it. But it was no Providence Journal. They have some of the best columists - Mark Patinkin, Bob Kerr, M. Charles Bakst, Stanley Aronson, MD (he is the best columnist EVER - oh, I so love him - he is in Monday's OP/ED or used to be) and I know I am forgetting some of the others, sorry.


What provoked my little nostalgia for my hometown newspaper this afternoon is that I visited the online site to look for something related to my home town. I appreciate the effort they put in to the site. I just wish I could buy the real thing, because I would. Every day. Crazy sorta, isn't it? But I just want that little part of my life back. Where I could sit for 30 minutes and read the paper and turn my brain on. I really liked that and loved the way the writers at the ProJo helped me do that.

In so many ways as we advance technologically, we lose a little bit of our connections to our humanity. Do computers bring us closer together?



In the home I live in, there are three people living here. We have three televisions each with a TiVo and three people watching different rooms. Is this necessarily a good thing? I remember when people watched television together because they had to. Doesn't this also help people get along because they spend more time together socializing across generations as family units? Again, I'm not knocking technology, we just have to balance out what we do so that we don't lose too much of our collective/community selves to our individual/online selves.

The opinion of a Bad Kitty - take it or leave it.