This post is about what’s made this post so hard to write – not in an emotionally wrenching sense, but a practical one.

One of the implications of living in an increasingly connected world – the commonplace experience, for instance, of reading not just your local paper in the morning, but a collection of news from sources around the world – is that being out of touch makes more of a difference than ever.

Spending a week or so without reliable access to the internet, television or even radio news (the local NPR station goes in more for music than talk) has indeed been an experience of disconnection. It’s been a busy time under any circumstances, but even so there is a way in which the dimensions of daily life seem to have pulled in a little bit by virtue of being so out of touch.

It seems like an overly simple, mechanistic way to think about it, but it’s as if there’s just less in my brain than there usually is. The approaching football season, something I would usually follow with an unnecessary degree of care, is a vague and distant thing. As I ponder a replacement for my apparently deceased wireless router, I’m horrified to realize that I’ve not read a computer hardware review or looked at an online sale circular for longer than I can remember.

Most pressingly, today, however, preparing to write a printculure post there was no week’s worth of news to mentally sift through. I realize that I have no idea what’s happening, or how it’s being covered. This part of disconnection has reminded me of a student’s query in a class some years ago. I was encouraging them to take more interest in the current events of the world after class discussion revealed that no one in class was aware of some event of importance. As I was winding up my pontification a student raised his hand and asked why it really mattered if they knew anything about what was going on. His position was something along the lines of: “OK, so you know about all this stuff but you can’t change anything, so it doesn’t matter.”

Surely a testament to my commanding presence in the classroom, this challenge has stuck with me and, as I noted above, returned with some urgency in the last week. The very practical aggravation of disconnection urges me to wait until I’m blissfully reconnected next week to answer the question of why knowing what’s happening matters.

(Sneak preview: part of the answer occurred to me when I heard this happen on the radio in the car.)