Technology has never been a writer’s friend. Dorothy Parker complained that she knew so little about the typewriters she relied on for a living that she once bought a new one because I couldn’t change a ribbon in my hand.
I started this piece two months ago but lost it. Like yesterday’s snows of Villon or the cousin who owed me, the words disappeared. I was so overwhelmed by the sense of futility, self-righteousnessand worn out, I have not yet been able to face the thought of reviving the argument. email, Facebookand LinkedIn was easy because they didn’t ask me much, but the opportunity to create something new only to have it disappear without a trace, I realized that I had a deeper sense of anxiety which I wanted to admit.
I felt like Parker: I wanted to buy a new computer that wouldn’t fail me, and I thought I could fix the bug. I wanted to part with my old car because it was playing me for a fool.
The reason for my relationship with my computer 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 dependence on many machines in my life, but they are vulnerable to my wants and needs, even though they respond to my fingertips and require new additions.
I do not have the only experience of technology of betrayal (BT). When I asked friends for their stories, they lit up my screen like a pinball machine. Robert S. McCallister immediately replied, “When the operator stopped saying ‘Number, please’.” Nick Sakhnovsky helped explain it: “I broke my pencil in kindergarten,” he recalled, though the one color was solid and the sides smooth; Nick blames it concentration as a child. Jamie Wolf Laure recalled that when her daughter was a college student and needed money quickly, she insisted that her parents just say, “Send me a fax, okay?”
Artist Chad Stanley said that “the first time the modem screamed” technology betrayed him, and accomplished writer Jo-Ann Mapson shared my heartache (but on a deeper, higher level) with “the first time I lost it.”
Nancy Pelati said that when she returned to school at age 45, she “finished an epic essay, hit the page, and lost it. It was probably the most brilliant piece I’ve ever written.”
I have to admit: Even in this last round of losing the initial copy of the piece for Psychology today about technology, I’ve struggled with feeling like a big outside editor (I’m a recovering Roman Catholic and I childhood religion only appears in such punishing superstitions) telling me to start writing again because the first few passages were not good enough. A “best of all possible worlds” option, perhaps, or a way out of a long, wide swath of despair? In any case, I had to attend in person.
Other friends have inspiring stories. Joan Muller is amazing: “I became a graphic designer before the digital world. I learned from the geniuses of the Renaissance: type design, sign letters, silk screen, gold leaf application, design, modeling, scale drawing and the use of tools in wood and metal construction. Amazing repertoire of academic drawing and painting, until someone with a Nikon and a good Photoshop overtakes me. luckily, I’ve outgrown not only my successes, but also my competitive failures, and spent decades teaching them the art and systems of my first love.
At the end of last semester, one of my creative writing students at UConn asked out of the blue if I wanted my desk to work in the office of a math or physics or marine cell biology professor, so that it wouldn’t work as a fancy word processor. “What you do is important and that’s all,” she quickly followed up, knowing I hadn’t made the grade yet. “But what if the computer wants to discover galaxies or galaxies genes???”
Suggesting that he write a short story based on the idea, I found myself wondering if this young man should consider adding another major because he felt limited in his life choices and wondered if I had neglected my OS ambitions.
Although both may be true, I am only concerned with the former; the young woman needed to know how limitless her own abilities and talents could be at this point. educationbut the tools of my craft that I have decided to consider technology are available for my use.
When my devices let me down, they don’t come back to me. And I will not fail them. Most importantly, I will not fail myself.
