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Of course, even in those halcyon days of yore, AM radio pretty much sucked, and about half the time I was reduced to silently bitching about how much ‘this song totally blows.’ I mean, exactly how often can one listen to Don McLean's American Pie before experiencing a certain dyspepsia?

Later on, the Walkman supposedly perfected the art of drowning out parents’ blather and school-day mutterings. And it had a major advantage: you got to select the music you drowned in. Radical! (as we used to say.)

Perennially the source of the best, hippest trends, the pioneering refuseniks were... Japanese teenagers. On a crowded Tokyo bus, using a Walkman to zero out the place between the headphones is an understandably attractive prospect. It’s no less alluring in the back of your parents’ station wagon in Peoria or El Paso.

Something had begun, a thing that went from answering machines to VCRs to universal remotes to cell-phones to portable video games to Caller-ID to programmable cable boxes to TiVo to... oh my, to the Internet-ready PC.

It has become a revolution. The machinery ensures you need only talk to those people you wish to talk to, watch the shows you wish to watch (only when you wish to), and you can chose the world you inhabit (whether it’s Mario’s or Zelda’s). Even better, for the ultimate immersion in Society, there’s always a chat room where you can behave like whatever sort of jerk you wish you really were. That is, assuming your online persona isn't the jerk you’re on your way to truly becoming.

Now, I love my computer. I do. I’d like to think it loves me back, regardless of its occasional ‘issues,’ and our frequent tiffs. I mean, no relationship can be rosy all the time.

And it’s hardly a new idea that technology can be vaguely isolating to its users. But there is another, less-overt action that all the hardware is staging.

An example: My partner and I have separate user accounts on our ‘puter. We started out working together, but things quickly turned sour: I like bigger fonts, so sue me. Our wallpapers are different. His icons are puny. (I’m sorry, dear, they just are. Perhaps it’s hormonal; it’s okay, I still love you.) His account has some wacky Folder-view configuration that just confuses me no end. My Windows ‘theme’ is more attractive— there, I said it.

Sharing the same overall configuration quickly became an untenable situation. We tried to work it out. We communicated about it, but in the end we simply had to split. We have dual custody of certain web bookmarks, but our web dining is generally table-for-one.

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