Mash-up

In the year of our Lord 2007, I built a library. Indeed, I built two. One of them, a professional library, was built into an office where I carry out the pleasant business of penning novels, essays and columns. The other was a formal library – nothing more or less.

In the professional library, I can bend over and ponder a brightly coloured tangle of cables and sockets. Some bring the world to my desktop via a high-speed internet connection; others use a local area network to spread that connectivity throughout the house. On the glowing cluster of huge, power-hungry screens that dominate most of the tabletop real estate at one end of my workbench, you may find up to a dozen windows open. Meanwhile, in the media room above, a small tower of web-connected gaming consoles, a dedicated server and a Foxtel iQ box occasionally reach down to share files with the computer on which I’m working.