Modern Technology and Me

I’ve been having issues lately with modern technology. Our cell phone culture, for instance, has me hopping mad. Aside from annoyance at people driving while talking on their cell phones (please don’t do this, folks!), my interactions on the Internet and with certain hardware devices are becoming major distractions in my life. Don’t get me wrong. I adore technology, but does it have to be so annoying?

Facebook Oh, where to begin? Facebook is a great place to reconnect with old friends and stay in touch with people spread all over the globe. But I don’t understand a lot of it. What is up with Farmville, for instance? I’m happy if someone is happy playing a game, but do I want to know they just scored 100,000 points? Not really.

Yet this stuff pops up automatically in and amongst all the meaningful information I truly want to read, such as my cousin’s reporting of her mission trip last year or my friend Tim’s announcement that he was moving back to the States. I also adore reading funny stuff, like a daughter’s reaction to a friend’s haircut, or sweet stuff, like videos of kids being kids. I also like whiny status updates because they make me feel not so alone in the world. That stuff is real. Farmville isn’t.

My motto for Facebook: Let’s keep Facebook real!

Twitter I signed up for a Twitter account just because someone famous* tweeted about me. How sadly narcissistic is that? When you first register, Twitter automatically gives you randomly selected tweeters to follow. I don’t know these people and don’t care that they just went to Starbuck’s. I had to “unfollow” them one by one manually. Perhaps there is a way to do this en masse, but I couldn’t figure it out. After wasting ten minutes of my life, I decided I could do without Twitter.

And is “tweeter” the right term for a person who twits/tweets/tw…? I give up.

My Mini Laptop George bought me a cute little red laptop for Christmas. It’s small enough to fit comfortably in my purse (which is pretty big) so I can write while waiting for Jack at therapy or at Barnes and Noble while drinking a mocha and feeling all J.K. Rowling-ish in a café.

But there are some issues with this little laptop. I’d like to know when Microsoft started hooking advertising to its software. I can run MS Word on my shiny red laptop, but ads pop up on the side. Sigh. I hate clutter on my teeny, tiny screen, but can I afford $600 (more than the cost of the computer) to download an unpolluted version of MS Office to it? Not really.

George has suggested some freeware that will work like MS Word, which is one of the greatest inventions of any century in the history of mankind. I’m hopeful.

It also took a long phone call and surrendering control of my laptop to a friendly non-native English speaker to get Norton AntiVirus installed. At least now when I’m surfing at Barnes and Noble Café, I won’t get hacked. I hope.

Electronic Books I file these in my brain under the heading Signs of the Coming Apocalypse. I don't even have one of these and they are annoying. It is great that other people enjoy them so much, but my aunt, whose bibliophile gene I share, has taken it upon herself to convince me I cannot live without one. This not only breaks my heart but makes me want to go to Barnes and Noble and buy a bunch of REAL books while drinking a mocha just because I can!

Cell phone I’ve never sent a text message to anyone. Shall I wait until you recover from falling off your chair in shock? The only person who sends me text messages isn’t even a person—it’s the cell phone company. I went so far as to learn how to delete text messages just to have the satisfaction of figuratively hanging up on AT&T without reading their superfluous marketing.

And by the way, I’m morally opposed to using the word text as a verb. Turning text into a verb weakens its effectiveness as a vaguely inclusive and extremely useful bit of jargon in literary theory. I imagine only literary theorists care about keeping text a noun, and I realize my protest will be as effective as Don Quixote tilting at windmills or Madonna trying to recapture her youth.

I’m sorry. Was that mean? Madonna, it’s a free country and you’re allowed to do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt anybody. I wish you a happy life.

My Palm Pilot A few months ago, I wasted hours of my life trying to load the software for my Palm Pilot on my laptop. Hours I will never get back, folks. I love my Palm Pilot, but the current situation is sort of scary. If that thing crashes, or I drop it, or solar flares erase its memory card, I have no back-up of the information on it because the back-up information was lost when my old laptop hard drive crashed a year ago. All my addresses, phone numbers, and appointments are on that thing. Krikey.

Please please please tell me I am not alone in my love/hate relationship with technology. All these gadgets and websites perform wonderful services, but I almost wish I'd had a college class in managing them in my life. Oh, wait. When I was in college, only cell phones existed, and they were the size of bricks.

Now, I feel old and annoyed.

I need chocolate. Or perhaps a dope slap to stop my whining. Whatever.

*Jennifer McGuire, rock star of the stamping world, has tweeted about my stamping blog several times. I get hundreds—perhaps thousands—of hits each time she does this. She’s my new best friend.