The Digital Age

People of my generation are reputed to be terrified of technology. We don’t understand social media; we are constantly scammed on Craigslist; we don’t understand why no one uses a telephone booth (except in old Superman episodes) and we drop cellphones in the toilet, sometimes on purpose. Much of this is true, to a greater degree in some cases, but my history is different. I was one of the first people in my little village to own an Apple IIe computer when they first were marketed. Even though I used it mostly for playing a space video game on a floppy disk(!) where the goal was to blast into an orbital trajectory and then dock with a space station within a time limit. A time limit I never managed to achieve beyond the Novice level.

Nonetheless, I created a household budget within a spreadsheet, featuring investments and savings and yearly expenditures; and promptly ignored it when there never seemed to be enough money coming in anyway. Word processing was a joy to learn, and I wrote a few letters, I think. It was such fun to be sitting at a keyboard, inventing stuff, cutting and pasting whatever, inadvertently erasing an award-winning project proposal permanently at the touch of a button.

Therein lies the frustration; the inability to avoid stupid mistakes while sitting at a keyboard. Forgetting to back up important documents. Wasting hours composing important documents that would easily have been written by hand in a few minutes in the first place. But I’ve adapted more easily than some to the computer age. And I get to reflect, when socializing with the children, that I remember when typewriters were clickety-clacking in dorm rooms, and White Out spilled willy-nilly over desktops and dirty socks.

Now, I embrace technology. I have a ring that tells me if I’ve had enough sleep. I keep the grocery list on my phone. I have two Facebook accounts, including one for my business. I avoided Twitter even when it was incredibly popular because I knew someday that Donald Trump and Elon Musk types would turn it into socialized bullying and terrorism. And I’m totally into email instead of actually talking with people. I think I have four different email accounts, one of which has over 2,327 (and counting) emails in the inbox. And another that still has 276 that are unopened. I’m leaving them for my children to go through after I’m dead. Some parents leave a pile of photo albums with blurry pictures; I’m leaving thousands of emails, some of which might contain valuable information on the retirement plans I never got around to completing.

Now, I dare you all to take the password challenge: can you – in fact – remember the passwords to your important digital accounts? Do you have them written down somewhere, available to the first thief who ransacks your senior living tenement? Why not just paste them on the wall right behind the computer and avoid being tortured by the thieves into giving them up? Or have you taken advantage of the next generation of security technology: digital face scans and fingerprint computer access? Now, after the thieves have tortured you, they’ll drag your semi-lifeless body over to the computer, forcing open your eyelids and pressing your nearly lifeless fingers into the keyboard. I remember a Tom Cruise movie (Minority Report) where he has his eyeballs replaced to avoid facial recognition software but keeps the old ones to access his high security former workplace. There’s the stuff of technology nightmares! My own technology hell isn’t the fear of the new, the digital, the high res and high tech. It’s the inability to get my fingers to hit the correct buttons on the screen. It’s not a problem I have with the digital; it’s a problem with my digits. I’m forced to choose between carrying a cellphone the size of a large dinner plate, or one I can put in my pocket and inevitably touch incorrect keys. With embarrassing results, more often than not. The other disadvantage to the small cellphone is that it manages to slip out of your pocket more easily, bounce around your nearly lifeless fingers, following the departure of the identity thieves, and fall – of course – into the toilet.