Bound for Boston yet again: Delta flight number who-knows-what, set to arrive at roughly half-past the-latest-possible-hour pm. On my way to meet one of my many dot com clients for a tour of the Boston hi-tech media and analyst firms—an essential part of the grind for any aspiring, young PR flack who dares to become more than just an e-mail or voice mail that never gets returned by busy editors.

Personally, it’s a great accomplishment for me to be on this trip. I’m not an account manager or supervisor or vice president. I’m essentially a bottom-feeder—just over a year out of college, desperately trying to keep up with the technological advances of both the industry and my clients. (To protect the innocent, I will keep my client’s name out of this. However, I will tell you that the company is one of the many new dot coms that will “change the way business is done over the Internet.” Heard that one before? I’ve used it in about a million e-mails to editors over the past year.)

At any rate, as I sit here in 19C (an uncomfortable seat that just doesn’t want to recline), I am struck by how entirely engrossed the two people next to me are in their technology: One fellow is vigorously typing an e-mail to… let’s see… oh, his grandmother it seems; the woman in the aisle seat is punching away on her Palm V with that fake little pen they provide. Her screen is so small that I can’t make out from here what she’s looking at exactly.

Taking inventory of the technology that besets me on all sides, I am struck that, a few years ago, these same passengers (myself included) would be reading the latest John Grisham novel, taking a nap on a hypo-allergenic pillow or maybe, just maybe, they would be listening to some show tunes through a set of earphones plugged into the armrest. Today, though, we are in an age where flight attendants help passengers connect to the Internet (instead of quietly handing out pillows), and the seat-back trays pull out just a bit further to accommodate laptops, fax machines, and DVD players. I’m suddenly angst-ridden with the technological state of my world, fearing that we are becoming paralyzed by the technology. Even worse, it seems that times have not only changed, they have become irreversible.

(Full disclosure: I am typing this piece on my Dell Latitude laptop, and for the next two days I will be hyping my dot com client to no end with some of the more influential techno-gurus of our time. But I’m okay with being the black pot.)

Philosophers and scientists have said for many years that human development depends greatly on the environment which we live in. We know the story of Pavlov and his hungry, drooling dogs—how by simple conditioning he created an environment where the dogs became instantly ravenous at the sound of a bell.

The same is happening to the tech generation. The technologies that purport to make our existence easier are permeating everyday life. You can’t go anywhere—not to the mall, to the park, to bed—without seeing some form of personal, and now portable, technology. It has become inescapable. (I have a new word for our environment, so reliant on the latest and greatest: Electronicopia, a combination of electronic and cornucopia; now, that’s my word, so if you want to use it in conversation, you have to ask my permission or I might sue you for intellectual property theft.)

Growing up today, the electronicopia is all but forced upon you. Case and point: When I graduated from The Kinkaid School (a Houston prep school) in 1994, there were computer labs (really nice ones in fact), and most of my friends had their own personal computers at home (the wealthy ones had the new 386's); the Internet had not made its way onto the high school scene yet, but I knew people who “logged on” with a technological wonder called Prodigy. Now, only six years later, students are strongly urged to have laptop computers because every classroom has an Internet connection. Instead of passing notes written in colorful highlighters to your sweetheart as you pass in the hall, high schoolers just shoot a quick e-card to their honeys suffering through the biology class across the hall.

Full Disclosure
A budding PR flack wrestles with the world he’s helping to create.

Friends and Family
How a man can get lost in the Information Age.

A Different Kind of Start-Up
In a distressed neighborhood at the heart of the high tech revolution, a school gives real options to its students.

CEO’s Having a Baby
Can a pregnant entrepreneur get the venture capital to keep her startup alive?

Escaping the Corporate Cult(ure)
A former Silicon Valley dot com insider lashes out against the technology industry's HR efforts.

Money Changes Everything II
Economic futurists predict that, thanks to technical innovation, the road ahead is paved with gold.

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andrew@thealarmclock.com & brian@thealarmclock.com