Caveat Lector

(This is in answer to the blogging prompt I gave my class this week, in case anyone is wondering why it seems out of left field.)

My dad, like most dads, took me to the office every once in a while, with all due stern caution about Sitting Quietly and Being Good. I believe it was on one of those visits that I saw my first acoustic coupler. Handset modem. You know what I mean (or maybe you don’t). Stick the telephone handset in the vinyl sockets. Earsplitting screeches ensue.

I may be one of the last people on this earth to have learned to type on a manual typewriter.

That was in the eighth grade, in Mexico. I didn’t actually type on a computer until a few months later, when our martinet history teacher back in the States demanded a letter-perfect typewritten double-spaced final paper. My dad sighed and took me to the office, where he introduced me to a Commodore 64 and something that might or might not have been WordStar.

Honestly, I can’t say I liked the thing very much. It wanted me to type weird two-letter commands starting with colons. Instead of black ink on white paper, I had to learn to get used to green phosphors on black. And it’s hard to get anything done when you’ve been adjured time and time again Not To Break The Expensive Equipment.

Times do indeed change. I make my living working with the equipment. I’m not afraid of it any more (… usually; kernel panics are legitimately scary). And I’ve become dependent on it to a substantial degree.

Dependent? But we’re not supposed to be dependent on technology!

Please. Go find a cave and live in it. If you can’t live without books, you’re dependent on technology. Can we get over the mistaken notion that technology is novelty and move on? Thanks.

Most of what I read these days, and nearly everything profession-related that I read, I read from a screen. Honestly, if ebooks weren’t DRMed up the wazoo, I’d read my pleasure reading that way too. With two cross-country moves in three years, never mind the trail of broken bookcases I’ve left in my wake over the years, I’m coming to the conclusion that the boxes of paper are more ruddy trouble than they’re worth. (But DRM is worse, so this is me not taking the plunge. Yet.)

Quite a few of my friends live online. My old college buddies. My roleplaying buddies. Friends I haven’t met yet. Just a moment ago a friend I haven’t met yet IMed to cheer me up because I have had a remarkably pointless and frustrating day. You know what? It worked.

Want a cliché? Here’s a cliché. I met my husband online. It’s the honest truth.

I keep coming back to Andy Clark. Buffle the MacBook, Nova the PowerBook G4, the Silver Surfer, they’re part of my brain. Without them, I am not whole; I could learn to live without them, but I would have to learn. Retrain my thought processes. Remember how to remember. Reclaim my handwriting, even. It’s a scary prospect.

That eighth-grader? She could never have imagined.