Somewhere between the information technology guru and the casual PC-user, you can find me. As Communications Manager at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, I have to stay on top of emerging communication tools. I need to know how people communicate now and learn how they will communicate in the future in order to make the museum relevant to their lives. Since undertaking my current role, I have developed a morning work ritual. At 8:30, I enter the office with my two-cup mug of coffee. At 8:35ish I begin checking my personal email account, checking my MySpace page, checking the IMA’s MySpace page, checking my Facebook page, checking my Flickr account, checking the IMA’s Flickr account, reading the headlines of NYtimes and the Indy Star, reading the latest postings of my dozen or so favorite art and tech blogs, and finally checking YouTube for the newest videos. At 9:00 am with half of my coffee gone, I move on to my work email account. During that half hour, I sometimes feel like my head might just explode from the amount of content I try to cram into it. The fast pace of technology and the amount of content that is now accessible through the internet, both excites and overwhelms me.
I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a computer. Before I even entered school, my parents bought the family our first computer, an IBM PC Junior. I can still remember my dad’s glee when he hooked it up for the first time. As the screen glowed, he stood back and admired it with the same giddiness that the father in A Christmas Story had while staring at that Leg Lamp. It’s a face filled with something between astonishment and bewilderment. Just like that lamp, the PC Junior was certainly something to look at. The best way to describe it was block-like. Even at that, it was half the size of any other computer made at the time and that made it remarkable to my parents who had grown up in a world of main frame computers that took up entire basements of corporations. To me, it was just a replacement for the Atari, as all my sister and I really used it for was video games.
The PC Junior was the beginning of a long series of computers that our family had growing up. Each one was a little smaller, a little faster and a little better than the last, but honestly, they were all used by my family as a replacement for the typewriter and the Nintendo. It wasn’t until my sophomore year in high school that we got the internet at our house. For the first time, I understood that the computer had more potential than I ever gave it credit. I heard the phrase World Wide Web for the first time that year during a dinner conversation at Thanksgiving. The memory of my uncle’s explanation of this world-changing phenomena is vivid and I think that without being completely sure of the consequences, I knew that somehow this World Wide Web was going to play an important role in my life. I had no idea it would be so essential to my future career!
Stay tuned as I navigate through the exciting world of technology and ecommunications. I’ll be sure to add another cup of coffee to my thermos in the morning and add “write blog” to my list of things to do! I’m looking forward to it.
Filed under: Marketing, Musings, New Media
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