Technology hasn’t been my friend lately. While editing a column last week, the keyboard on my laptop decided to take a vacation. Luckily I had an external keyboard in the car (I was house/cat-sitting at the time, and the keyboard had done this once before), so I was able to get back to editing. My friend/birthday twin/sister from another mister Sarah lent me a plug-in mouse so I wouldn’t go completely ’round the bend trying to use the trackpad on the malfunctioning laptop while having to use the external keyboard. (She prefers using a mouse, but I actually like the trackpad, as long as the keyboard works; I find myself trying to move the cursor on the desk when I’m in the office with a desktop computer, which is embarrassing.)
You’d think there’d be an easier way. Oh, yeah, it’s buying another computer, which as I type this on the old one is en route, so I get the fun of setting up a computer all over again (it’ll be oodles of fun later having to re-input networks when I house/cat-sit). Meanwhile my phone and iPad are giving me the side-eye since they’re limping along as well.
(I’m preparing this for the blog on the new computer, which arrived Monday, so I spent a big part of my day working on two computers at once. It’s still not quite set up to my liking, but it’s getting there. It is nice to have a working keyboard again and not have to fight to highlight the correct thing. Of course now I have to start over on stickers.)
Could I live without technology? Not in my profession, certainly, and considering how much of my entertainment is delivered via technology (yes, I even read library books on my iPad), not very happily.
Technology has a lot of advantages to recommend it, much of which my generation missed out on during school. Where now we have Google and other search engines and just about every kind of reference material imaginable available at the click of a button on the computer (So. Many. Dictionaries.), we had to head to the library and physically thumb through books for information we needed. We didn’t have the Internet in the palm of our hands (heck, we didn’t have the Internet, period), and some of us still remember the weight of those rotary-dial phones, which you could do some serious damage with if you decided to use them as weapons; the receiver alone was heavier than today’s smartphones (and good Lord, it took forever to dial a number). We can do things quicker and more efficiently than before (ask me how much more I love digital page proofs than paper ones).
We can be endlessly entertained, at least as long as we have power, even when we’re somewhere we don’t have access to the Internet because we can download books, movies, music, games or whatever beforehand. And in professions like mine, you can work just about any time and anywhere, which comes in awfully handy when life intervenes (and you can even order replacement technology to arrive within hours or days).
Medical technology has made diagnosis so much easier, and it’s helped people live much longer than they would have without it. We no longer have to be in the same room, or even on the same continent, to meet with people (a big plus for major introverts like me). You can easily stay in touch with friends and family, no matter where they are in most cases, and you can even find love (I remember doing a story for the campus TV station on a couple of friends who met on a bulletin board in the early days of the Internet. We’ve come a long way since then.)
However, technology has disadvantages as well, cost being one of them. There’s the cost of the tech itself, plus related costs (security, Internet access, maintenance, etc.), which means having to figure out how to pay for it; if it had been available when I was a kid, I would have been one of those kids who would have to depend on the school providing a computer because we certainly couldn’t afford it. The new computer is being financed through Affirm, and house/cat-sitting will pay for it (two nights equal one payment); I’d be in big trouble if I had to come up with the money immediately for it.
There’s also increasing dependence; watch a kid raised on smartphones and computers try to cope when networks, sites, or power are down. Even those of us who were nearly Luddites as youth get a little twitchy now when offline, not by choice, for an extended period of time (I don’t get so twitchy on my social media breaks because they’re planned). Plus, with all the efficiency built in to technology, it means that sometimes people lose their jobs or brick-and-mortar stores go out of business.
And security risks … oof. That’s one of the reasons I pay for enhanced protection on my computer, and use cards and apps that track purchases and alert me to suspicious ones (that came in handy a few weeks ago when someone somehow used my Walmart card, which is my only credit card; I mostly use my debit card, and my bank app alerts me if it detects suspicious activity).
Still, I’d rather live with technology of most sorts than without it. Besides all the advantages and efficiencies afforded by technology, when it fails, it can be funny.
Spellcheck is one of those things that will always be useful (hint: please use it if you send anything to a newspaper), but autocorrect provides both endless frustration and hilarity (see today’s editorial cartoon on the Voices page, for one, which I’m using here as well). And if you use talk-to-text on your phone or tablet, you’ve likely seen your share of whoppers. I don’t use it on my Android phone at all, and instead spend extra time combing through my texts before sending them.
I do, however, sometimes dictate letters into my iPad. Writer and Facebook friend Crescent Dragonwagon refers to Siri’s frequent mishearings of dictation as “Department of: Siriously?” … which I think is perfect. My iPad’s Siri apparently has a bit of a dirty mind because a lot of the mishearings there I can’t share in a family newspaper (she seems to have an obsession with genitalia, for one thing). Sometimes, though, I have to reset Siri because she’s inexplicably decided I said, “No one asked of your world, Bruce Moku, do you know where you shoot Ward did you doing OK?” (I was dictating a Charlie Allbright column from an image [we didn’t have a text version in the archives] that started, “Now let us gather ’round the smoker while the master chef Howard Daugherty works his magic on the turkey.” Sure, Siri, same thing. And who the hell is Bruce Moku?)
But when my hands are cramped from typing, yeah, I’ll deal with occasional weirdness with technology. Plus, that’s where all my games are (hey, they’re mostly puzzles and word or match games, which are good for the brain; I swear!).
And oh, yeah, how else would I take so many pictures of cats?
Serenity is a fuzzy belly 