Technology has never been a writer’s friend. Dorothy Parker complained that she knew so little about the typewriters on which she relied for a living that she once “bought a new one because I couldn’t change the ribbon on the one I had.”
I started this piece two months ago, but I lost it. Like Villon’s snows of yesteryear or the cousin who owed me money, the words just disappeared. So beleaguered was I by a sense of futility, self-loathing, and obsolescence, I hadn’t been able to face the thought of resurrecting the argument until today. Emails, Facebook, and LinkedIn were easy because they didn’t demand much of me, but the possibility of creating something new only to have it vanish without a trace was, I realized, causing me a far deeper sense of anxiety than I wanted to acknowledge.
I was feeling like Parker: I wanted to buy a new computer, one that wouldn’t betray me by assuming I’d be able to correct what went wrong. I wanted to break up with my old machine because it played me for a fool.
The reason my computer and I have had a dysfunctional relationship is because it’s entirely 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’ve invested my emotions into my own dependence on many machines in my life, but they are invulnerable to my wishes and needs even though they respond to my fingertips and keep asking for new add-ons.
Mine is not the only experience of Betrayal Technology (BT). When I asked friends for their stories, they lit up my screen like a pinball machine. Robert S. McCallister replied immediately with, “When the operator no longer said ‘Number, please.” Nick Sakhnovsky helped put it perspective: “My crayon broke in kindergarten,” he remembered, despite being a sturdy one with a flat side; Nick blames it on his concentration as a kid. Jamie Wolfe Lohr remembered that when her daughter was a college student and needed money in a hurry, she insisted that her parents just “FAX it to me, okay?”
Artist Chad Stanley said he was betrayed by technology the “first time the modem screamed,” and accomplished novelist Jo-Ann Mapson echoed my own heartbreak (but at a deeper, more resounding level) with “the first time I ever lost a chapter.”
Nanci Pelati said that when she went back to school at age 45, she completed “an epic essay, clicked off the page, and lost it. This was possibly the most brilliant piece I ever wrote.”
I have a confession to make: Even during this last round of losing the initial version of the piece for Psychology Today on technology, I’ve grappled with the sense that somehow The Big Outside Editor (I am a Recovering Roman Catholic, and my childhood religion appears only in such punishing superstitions) was telling me to begin writing again because the first passages were not good enough. A version of “the best of all possible worlds,” perhaps, or a way to swerve out of despair’s wide, wide lane? Either way, I had to be involved personally.
Other friends have tales of breathtaking inspiration. Joan Muller’s is remarkable: “I became a graphics designer in the world before digitization. I learned from geniuses in their Renaissance era fields: font design, sign lettering, silk screen, gold leaf application, drafting, model making, scale drawing, and the use of tools in wood and metal fabrication. [Yet in time] my skill sets became as quaint as a slide rule and I fell back on my even more quaint academic drawing and painting repertoire, still finding work as an ‘illustrator’ until someone with a good Nikon and Photoshop could outpace me. How fortunate that I surpassed not just my successes but also my competitive failures by folding them back full circle into rewarding decades teaching visual art and systems thinking on the altar of my first love of the humanities.”
Towards the end of last semester, one of my creative writing students at UConn rather flippantly asked whether my office desktop wished it could work in the office of a professor of mathematics or physics or marine cell biology so that it could do more than act as a glorified word processor. “What you do is important and everything,” she followed up quickly, aware that I hadn’t yet filed grades. “But what if the computer wants to explore galaxies or splice genes??”
Suggesting she write a short story based on the thought, I found myself wondering two things: whether this young person should consider adding another major because she felt limited in her own life’s choices and wondering whether I was underestimating the ambitions of my operating system
While both might be true, I am concerned with only the first; the young woman needed to discover how limitless her own capacities and talents could be at this point in her education, but the tools of my craft, which is how I have decided to regard technology, exist for my use.
When my devices let me down, they aren’t getting back at me. And I am not failing them. More important, I am not failing myself.
