Blogging live from 30,000 feet

This is it! My first post written and published in the skies, 30,000 feet above green patches and city squares (looks like I’m right above St. Louis as I type), all aboard a Southwest flight equipped as a WiFi hotspot. For $5 I have been surfing the net from Phoenix all the way through to Boston, and it has been a provocative experience. When the crew announced we were a WiFi hotspot I was both ecstatic and conflicted. How I love my in-flight rituals! I’ve gotten skilled at taking a certain percentage of the flight to write, devoting another time period to reading, then busting out some tunes to prepare me for acclimation back into the social grid. Throwing the opportunity to access the internet at me was a conflict of consternation and curiosity. Here’s an oppportunity to get blogging about flying from a place I never thought I’d get to: ON a plane! But then, when will I justify finishing Pirate Latitudes by Michael Crichton if not on a plane?

Welp, in the end, I fit it all in. I just had to overlap my tunes while I type and save my mental revisit and review of the conclusion of Pirate Latitudes for later.

Have any of you been WiFi-ed in the air yet? I’d love to hear your thoughts. I’m feeling a bit philosophical about it; I suppose later I can blame it on the altitude. Yet, in this moment, I’m blown away by how quickly technology has evolved to keep us always connected, and it seems the limitations of total network immersion grow fainter and fainter. I’m excited by this idea, yet humbled. I like the idea of being able to ‘unplug’ and be ‘unreachable.’ I think it’s healthy. We’re so innundated by the need to be up-to-the-minute-up-to-date that we’re becoming programmed into automatically updating our statuses and photos as if it’s how we’ve always operated. I’m working hard to adjust to this transition; but I struggle with the narcissism that haunts me as I post to this very blog via my cell phone or comment on a friend’s tweet she posted 15 seconds ago. I feel I’m developing a complex and learning how to socalize in this way has been like going back to school. It’s the new school for the old school.  I’m seeking a balance between the A-D-D actions of tweeting-facebooking-blogging and the art of socializing with 3-dimentional people. It can be madding, trying to stay dedicated to the full-time job of building a online identity, while trying not scuttle the ship, lose my sanity and abdandon the whole thing. I suppose the best way to start was to embrace being online on an airline… and then tell the world about it. And thus I carry on…