Straddling the Digital Divide

The list-makers love this time of year, not just for the naughty-versus-nice collection, but stories of the year, athletes of the year, disasters of the year and so on and so on.

A list I came across this week has me a bit worried I'm on the wrong side of the digital divide; the Huffington Post published the following items that have become obsolete in the last ten years, and I'm still using most of them!

VCRs And VHS Tapes
travel agents
land lines
book stores
maps
separation of work and personal life
forgetting (thanks to the internet's never-ending memory)
watches
900 numbers
calling people
classifieds
encyclopedias
CDs
film
address books
dialup
wires
faxes
letters
catalogs

I must admit some confusion; I never did use the 900 numbers, much of my social life is indeed organised through facebook or email, but I still wrote out Christmas cards, by hand. And to top off my confusion, this week, my 6-CD changer from 1998finally died, and I'm at a loss for what to do for music in my house, other than of course, the radio. I have several Mp3 players, but none has the cord required to send the sound through my ageing amp to my relatively new speakers. Do I get a new amp? Do I load up on a whole new system and then have to take the time to load thousands of songs into a new player? The amp I have is working fine and it offends my environmental sensibilities to throw it out while it's still functional. Oh, it's a conundrum, all right, and honestly, how can I be expected to vacuum without Handel or The Hip?!