Some months ago, for reasons which have become obscure to me, I purchased a 1Gb SanDisk U3 Cruzer Memory Stick: enough juicy words in that title to grab techies, musicians, dudes, the aging, and sportsmen by the collar, and haul them to the counter, cash in hand. If the words weren’t enough, the price of the ‘stick — $69 at the time — was neatly offset by not one, but two $20 rebates. You do the math.

I assume I was trying to move some document from one place to another, and this growing technology seemed the simplest way to do it. Put the memory stick into a USB port (“U” should stand for “ubiquitous”, since almost all computers made in the last half-decade boast them: the square slots about the size of a chiclet) and presto! you have a mini disk drive, without the disk. And without the drive, since there is not power; without the weight, since the whole unit weighs about as much as ten paper clips in your hand; without anything but an every-growing amount of flashy flash memory at your disposal.

The original units were exactly that: a replacement for the floppy disk (which held, at last gasp, 1.44 megabytes of information, 1,440,000 tidbits of data) which was beyond obsolete by the time it finally became optional equipment on your new desktop computer. The upgrade was breathtaking: a thousand times more storage (that is one thousand times more!) in a fleck of plastic and silicon. I was even more surprised to find that, once I plugged the USB stick into my Windows computer, it booted up a small menu, from which I could choose programs to run, installed on the stick itself. The revolution has begun.

So, what’s the buzz?

The buzz, my friends, is that with 1 gigabyte of storage, plus the ability to install and run personalized programs, I have in effect taken my entire computer workspace and stuck it on a half-ounce chip, which can be activated anywhere on the planet by simply inserting the chip in a chiclet-sized slot. I don’t need to install or configure programs on any machine, don’t have to worry about logins or passwords or drivers: all I need is a Windows computer that turns on. Once we have achieved Power, I can:

• Use an Internet browser, complete with my research bookmarks (which are synchronized to an Internet server so I will always see my work)
• Run a mail client which will connect to all of my mailboxes (of which there are several, I am afraid)
• Load free online communication with anyone on the planet, using a universal Instant Messenger
• Load the Skype Internet telephone with a little earbud and built-in microphone for voice communication
• Read and doctor images, play music, read Adobe PDF files, read and write Office documents with an open source (free) word processing and spreadsheet suite, take notes on a notepad, keep track of passwords, encrypt all personal data on this little device and, oh yes, use the latest version of Lotus Notes to post entries to this blog.

Livingstone was lost in the jungle for so long that his being found makes for a good story. He was lost in a land where the only communication was spoken word to ear, and only then, when the languages were at least proximate in their translations. One would like to believe that adventure still exists, that global vanishing-points can be found, and that one can step off the map into an isolation so profound that only the heroic efforts of an adventurer of equal stature would ever pull you back to civilization — what you have decided is civilized. But that is not the case. There are edges, but they begin to overlap, and little or no emptiness remains.

Had I traveled to India a hundred years ago…? Brilliant culture: depth of history and breadth of future. But now, I can travel with a world in my pocket, and with the merest flick of a finger the world can find me.

Hey, Livingstone. How’s the weather in Karnataka, dude?.

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