Wired
Rob Price

My wife and daughter and I drove to Washington for the New Year's weekend. We stayed with her sister, who lives near the national zoo, and we all visited the zoo Sunday afternoon to check out the new baby panda and visit the other animals.

But first it was necessary to organize all the electronic equipment we had acquired during the past year and which we would be carrying on our persons during our afternoon among the animals. This equipment includes a digital camera that is smaller than a pack of cigarettes, three cell phones and three iPods.

We laid the equipment on a coffee table to make sure we had everything. All together, it looked like the contents of an international spy's attaché case. The camera is especially slick, because it is so small. The iPods - two of the standard size and one smaller - look like communication devices from a science fiction movie. And the cell phones look like cell phones.

Each device comes with a significant array of wires. The iPods have ear phones, which are called "ear buds." They also have wires that connect them to a computer and allow them to be charged and loaded with music and photographs (The bigger iPods can also carry videos and movies).

The camera needs a special charging platform you have to plug into a wall socket; it also has a special wire that connects it to a computer for storing digital photographs. There are probably other wires that go with it, since there are more tiny ports along the side, but I've misplaced those.

The cell phones, of course, have wires that allow them to be charged. My daughter's cellphone has an extra wire that allows it to be connected to a computer, so she can download photographs she takes with the miniature camera that is embedded in the phone.

When you lay all this equipment on a table, the pile looks the inventory of an old Radio Shack. You need a lot of pockets to carry the equipment, or at least a large pocketbook. I dropped my cellphone into a pants pocket; the iPod went into the other side pocket. I had to slip on a sportcoat to accommodate the camera. I don't know how my wife and daughter carried their equipment.

Then we drove to the zoo to see the pandas and all the other animals, which included a female tiger and three cubs, two female lions and a male lion, one elephant, a hippo and some very exotic fish swimming around in a building called Amazonia.

There were many people at the zoo, and it seemed they had all brought electronic equipment, too - mostly cell phones they were using to take photographs of the animals and call friends to share the news they were standing in the middle of the zoo. Our daughter took several pictures with her cellphone; I preferred using my miniature spy camera. None of us actually used our iPods, although I saw lots of folks walking around with ear buds plugged into their ears. Most of the word, it seemed, was plugged into something: a phone, an iPod; a digital camera. We have become a nation of miniature electronics users. We are wired.

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Cell phones allow us to keep in touch with each other. Miniature digital cameras are easy to carry and let us take neat photographs. IPods are great for carrying around large libraries of music and photographs, in case you want to tune out the rest of the world for a while.

But there are downsides, and one of them is the sheer absurdity of needing a special suitcase to carry all your electronic gear whenever you take an overnight trip. My wife and I used to visit the national zoo when we lived in Virginia. That was 20 years ago, and we never felt the need to wire ourselves into a vast electronic communications network.

But I'm not complaining. We walked into the giant panda house, and I started filming the mother panda as she munched on some bamboo leaves. The baby panda waddled into the room then and sat next to its mother. It started chewing on some bamboo, and I kept filming.

I like being plugged in. I just need more pockets for all my wires.