Technology has never been a writer’s friend. Dorothy Parker complained that she knew very little about the typewriters she used for a living, and that she once “couldn’t replace the ribbon I had, so I bought a new one.”
I started this piece two months ago but lost it. Like Villon’s snow yesterday or the relative who owes me, the words simply disappeared. I was so overwhelmed by the sense of futility that self loathingand obsolescence, I have not been able to come up with the idea of resurrecting the argument until today. email messages, Facebookand LinkedIn was easy because they didn’t ask me much, but I realized that creating something new was an opportunity to just disappear without a trace, and it gave me a deeper feeling. worry than I care to admit.
I felt like Parker: I wanted to buy a new computer that wouldn’t betray me if I thought I could fix something that was wrong. I wanted to part with my old car because it played me for a fool.
The reason I have a bad relationship between my computer and me is that it is completely one-sided: it doesn’t care what I do. My Mac is just a gigolo.
Just as money doesn’t care who spends it, technology doesn’t care who uses it. I have invested my emotions in my addiction to many machines in my life, but they are insensitive to my wants and needs, even though they respond to my fingertips and keep asking for new additions.
Mine is not the only experience of betrayal technology (BT). When I asked my friends for their stories, they lit up my screen like a pinball machine. Robert S. McCallister immediately responded, “If the operator doesn’t say ‘Number’ anymore, please.” Nick Sakhnovsky helped predict this: “My pencil broke in kindergarten,” he recalled, although the flat side was sturdy; Nick blames it concentration in childhood. Jamie Wolfe Lohr recalled that when her daughter was a college student and needed money urgently, she insisted to her parents, “Fax it to me, okay?”
Artist Chad Stanley said that technology betrayed him “the first time the modem screamed,” and accomplished writer Jo-Ann Mapson echoed my heartbreak (but on a deeper, more resonant level) with “the first time I lost a chapter.”
Nancy Pelati says that when she returned to school at age 45, she “wrote an epic essay, hit the page, and lost it. It’s probably the most brilliant piece I’ve ever written.”
I have to admit: I lost the original version of the piece in the last round too. Psychology today in technology I somehow The Big Outside Editor (I am a recovering Roman Catholic and my childhood religion only appears in such punishing superstitions) told me to start writing again because the first few passages were not good enough. Perhaps a version of “the best of all possible worlds” or a way to get out of the wide, wide path of despair? Anyway, I had to attend in person.
Other friends have tales of thrilling inspiration. Joan Muller’s point is great: “I was a graphic designer in the pre-digital world. I learned from the geniuses of the Renaissance: type design, lettering, silkscreen, gold leafing, drafting, model making, scale drawing, woodworking and metalworking. (But over time) my skills have lagged behind. Good academic drawing and painting repertoire, good Nikon and Photoshop I still find work as an “illustrator” until the person who was leaves me behind, and I’ve brought not only my successes, but also my competitive failures full circle, teaching them to think about my visual arts and human qualities for decades.
At the end of last semester, one of my creative writing students at UConn asked me if I wanted my desk to work in the office of a math or physics or marine cell biology professor. “What you’re doing is important and all,” she said, quickly following, knowing I hadn’t made a grade yet. “What if a computer wants to study galaxies or mergers? genes???”
As I suggested that he write a short story based on this idea, I wondered two things: whether this young man should consider adding another major because he feels limited in his life choices, and whether I was underestimating the ambitions of my OS.
While both may be true, I’m only concerned with the first; the young woman was about to discover how limitless her abilities and talents were educationbut the tools of my craft, which is how I decide to approach technology, are available for my use.
When my devices let me down, they don’t come back to me. And I will not defeat them. Most importantly, I don’t beat myself up.
