A few years ago, I heard Studs Terkel say (on a radio program), that e-mail meant the "death of written communication". That is not taken out of context, Studs really thought that was going to be the case. Studs is usually pretty wise, but boy, was he ever wrong about e-mail. I think electronic communication has 'exploded' and multiplied communication as we used to know it. The only drawback may be the loss of 'material' correspondence - no letters to stow away in a shoe box in a closet for your descendants to find when they're doing a family history.

My family consists of my husband, myself, and our four sons and a foster daughter. Each of us has a Mac laptop, as did the girlfriend of one of our sons. This entire group was at my home for Thanksgiving last year. Eight laptops were in operation, all at once, with some of us instant message chatting between rooms in the house (jokingly, of course, and mostly for the boys to track their turns playing video games in a bedroom). Thank goodness for wireless networks.

We actually did speak to each other in person, and of course took a break from 'computing' to eat dinner. It was just a lot of fun to see us all with what has become a very important part of our lives, our Mac laptops. Too bad we forgot to take a group photo of it all.

I live out in the Boonies, but when my kids visit from the big city, they don't worry about missing their friends. They can always IM chat with them while they're here, and they do. When they're not visiting me in person, they chat with me online. I think we're more in touch these days than ever before, and that's a good thing.

PS. I have a special relationship with Apple Mac computers - I have always preferred the Mac operating systems to CP/M, MS DOS, Apple DOS and Windows. I was a desktop computer administrator several years (since 1979) before the Mac or Windows arrived on the market, and I dove right in with Mac support in 1984, when the Mac was released. Sadly, I was laid off from my Mac support job at the World's Greatest Newspaper in December, 2005, and Mac-based admin jobs are hard to come by. Computer support consulting is very competitive, and not as lucrative as it once was. I'll start work for the post office as a rural carrier next month, if I don't win the Lotto before then.