The play's the thing

I have been experiencing some changes around how I relate to technology and my work, of late. My history with technology is that I've been working around it since the mid/late 1980's and I've been building it for abou the past 10 years. When it comes to technology, I tend to get caught up in how to build it, how to design it, how to deploy it. But now that there are so many people out there who are doing exactly that (and frankly doing it better than I could, in important and obvious ways), there's actually less of a need for me to build my own technology.

Thinking back, I realize that I got into building tech because I couldn't find the tools or the websites or the applications that I wanted, so I built my own. And I learned a lot. But now that real honset-to-god tools like Blogger and Audacity exist, there's really no reason I should have to build my own from scratch, anymore.

And I find my relationship to technology changing a great deal, with regard to my work. Once, I had to build my own tools, my own websites, etc. But now there are plenty of industrial strength tools and resources out there and I can use them freely (many of them for free) to go back to my writing. And a lot of the new tools are much more robust than what I'd be likely to come up with.

It's a heady, exciting thing, to think that I'm able to get my work out there, in ways I could only dream of -- or in ways that never occurred to me to dream of. And now, I need to shift my focus away from the technology-centric to the creative-centric... see how it all fits together... use it in a complimentary fashion... make strides in my own work, rather than building things. Get it going on, like never before...