A Brief History of a Technophiliac

 "Technophilia" -- a love of technology

                This morning, I attempted to set up my mobile phone to communicate with my computer. Apparently, my computer does not have “Bluetooth” installed and therefore I must revert to a cabled connection, unless of course, my mobile has an Infrared connection. My flash drive modem with installed SIM card refused to find its server to allow an internet connection. As I hit the hard stone wall -- unable to connect --  a thought struck me: thousands of generations have never had this problem before. Or spoken this language. Just us. And the ones who come after.

                All my life I have looked forward to the 21^st Century – and I love that I have had the chance to live in it. I consider myself a “technophile,” in love with the machinery and the changes. Almost every day, I find surprise and delight in the workings of technology: the air conditioner, the microwave, the lightbulb, the HD flatscreen TV and how they all give greater comfort and ease to my life. As a child, my favorite reading was the Victor Appleton (Sr, Jr, II) series featuring “Tom Swift,” a boy inventor; my hero was Thomas Edison.  The “Toms,” it seemed to me then, had it right. Creative problem-solving by adapting or creating machinery seemed the most liberating of mental tools to a child who longed to grow up and grow out from under parental and school authorities.

Learning my numbers as a child allowed the added benefit of becoming able to visualize the freedom promised by the future. What would I be able to do that I could not do before? What new technologies would emerge? I spent many hours sketching a personal hovercraft, measuring specifications for a floating table that would be the size of my textbooks, that could accompany me through the school halls, carrying the weight of all those books. Another favorite game was to work out how many years it would be until I left the miseries of being a child and got to be an adult with my own free choice about what to do with my days. How old would I be when the new century dawns? As a ‘baby boomer,’ the Year 2000 – or “Y2K” as we called it then – arrived just days after I turned 46 – finally, a fully fledged, card-carrying “adult” alive in the 21^st Century.

                That New Year’s night (now a decade ago) remains clear in my mind. My mother, who was then on the cusp of so-called “old age” despite looking as lively and young as ever, was the same age my father was when he died. To me, she seemed physically struck down by the change of historical date; she came down with a fever and spent the night in bed. Panicky warnings had been sounding in the media for the previous few months that there was a ‘glitch’ in programming computers – somehow the young blades who designed the software “forgot” that there would be a new century and left out the necessary numerals. Dire warnings were circulated that computers would revert to the year “00” and we would all be thrown back to the birth of Christ. Worse still, it was predicted that whole technological systems that relied on computers would go down – a nation-wide blackout and machine failures of all kinds were to be expected. Serendipity (or unconscious cries for help) brought me a boyfriend who was both a fireman and an Emergency Medical Technician as well as an artist; he lived in a concrete shack with a woodstove, chopped his own wood, even brought home venison steaks from deer he had shot. On a night when it seemed the world might revert back to the conditions of my mother’s childhood, he seemed the perfect person to accompany my ailing mother and anxious me through the dark night of the turning of the centuries.

                Of course, that New Year’s night proved benign; no such disaster occurred. I reprogrammed my computer in plenty of time following the instructions sent out globally.  We broke open a bottle of 50- year old Chinese wine (the Chinese having the world’s longest continuous history but sorry, really awful wine). We toasted the new century. The next day, I taught the boyfriend to use the internet; he met a woman from California online in a  chat room about the Celestine Prophecy (serendipity, again), she came to visit him, and that was that. Fun while it lasted and I am forever grateful. My mother recovered quickly and I went on with my continued fascination about the crossing points between technology and creativity.

                Back in 1982 or ’83, I had been faced with a choice: either hire a secretary to take care of the administrative tasks of a small business or buy a computer. A human being would require a weekly salary, benefits, all sorts of paperwork to be filed with the government; the computer would be a one-time major payment plus yearly upgrades.  It could be used to organize, record, and duplicate the many repetitive tasks, and importantly, would allow me entry into the “wave of the future.” So I bought a Kaypro 2X with a CPM processor which at the time was considered close to the top of the line of personal computers. It was a great old machine in a hard squarish metal case. It was claimed that it could be dropped, used in desert dust, and still go on like the ‘Energizer Bunny’ or the Timex watch that “still keeps on ticking.” That phrase alone, “a Kaypro 2X with a CPM processor” indicates how rapid the changes have been in the ensuing years. It was soon outmoded, its dim screen replaced by a monitor that could show swirling colors and illuminated letters.

Commerce in the early 1990’s began to be “networked” and this technophile saw this development as a fascinating new lexicon of knowledge I might need to know.  I sat in front of a state-of-the-art cream-colored steel box manufactured by IBM, teaching my hands to perform the intricate commands which forced Wordstar and Word Perfect to spit out my words in print. I was lured to explore hundreds of advertisements by a company called appropriately “Prodigy” which allowed “jumps” from category to category, soon switching to America Online for its multicolored screens and its ubiquitous voice bleating, “You’ve got mail.” If it is a typical American trait to discard fashions as soon as they become a fad, then the digital industries got the message – once Marshall McLuhan wrote, “the medium is the message,” upgrades became a way of life.

What I thought I learned then was about the “inner workings” of the machinery and the minds who made the machines. If I pressed the Control button ^ and the one marked P, the computer and the printer would ‘talk’ to each other and out would pop my writings, neatly printed. After hundreds of hours entering addresses into the “DB3” (Dbase 3) and manipulations to produce reports and personalized envelopes, I felt I really understood the how-and-the-why of the logic behind the construction of software designed for office use. I could ‘run chkdsk’ (checkdisk) from the C: (C colon) prompt to check the computer was in working order. By the late 1980’s, I was something of a ‘computer expert’ and in the early 1990’s, I could tell upset customers how to remedy their situations over the phone.  “User friendly” was the watchword of the times and I repeatedly explained to others that computer software was still in its infancy. “I know the computer doesn’t respond the way you expect it to,” I would reassure, “but you need to follow the software designer’s logic, not your own. Someday, the industry will have studied enough customers’ complaints and they will make it easier. But for now, just read the instruction manual and follow the sequence exactly as it tells you to…”

                Always the forward thinker, my father protested the establishment of computer studies programs in editorials in the New York Times and at faculty meetings at Vassar College. The monolithic International Business Machines (IBM) was just down the road in Poughkeepsie, New York from Vassar where he taught for 25 years. IBM offered the college some 35 million dollars to set up a computer center and provide the technical support for a degree program. His was a lonely voice in the crowd when he stood up in faculty meetings. His main point: it is not the initial cost but the upkeep. He argued that in an academic institution of Vassar’s caliber, all funds should go first towards hiring the most qualified scholars, the best administrators, and scholarships for the best students – support for the people, in other words; then to improvements to the teaching facilities including the buildings. All expenditures should foster the highest intellectual aims.  He understood the “continuous upgrade” mentality years ahead. Funds would necessarily be diverted to the purchase of new computer equipment in order to “keep up with the times.” It would be interesting to track expenditures in the following years within one institution and within one particular computer studies program, but on the larger scale, his words were prophetic. How many billions have gone to equipment rather than to people since the personal computer began its conquest of the modern world? (Perhaps this could be an interesting study for a doctoral dissertation).

To come to 2010, the ‘guts’ of the machinery are far less transparent than they were back in the eighties. Icons have replaced written commands (thanks be to Apple / MacIntosh and Steve Jobs) and “user friendly” has been replaced by intuitive and “visual “intelligences.” Last spring, I installed a new version of Microsoft Office on my computer in order to work on a booklet to assist Thai teachers of English language. However, as I was working at the time in Thailand, some internal switch buried deep in the computer converted all the written commands into the elegant loops of Thai language – which I cannot read. Lucky for me, the icons remain the same and I could look up their meanings on the Microsoft website tutorials. Always a “PC” IBM and Microsoft aficionado, I was reminded of my first experience on a “Mac” in 1990 when I was working in Japan and all the commands were in Japanese. Hunting-and-pecking until I found what the visual clues (cues) lead to, I understood why artists were attracted to Macs / Apples. These machines exploited the over-arching logic by which, as the Chinese proverb says, “A picture is worth a thousand words.”

The secrets of the thousands of steps necessary to produce action by the computer’s ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ machinery and processes, the mechanics of technology are hidden away, like a safe locked up behind a picture on a wall. Click on an icon and wonders happen. The disadvantage is that I can no longer be a ‘computer expert.’ No matter how long I hunt and peck or how many emails I send asking for help, neither I nor local computer experts here in Malaysia can seem to reprogram my expensive MS Office software to override the Thai language commands and return them to U.S. (or at least Malaysian) English.

For the “21^st Century mind,” it looks like language will become less necessary and that technology will serve as a bridge across many social divides. The new generations all over the world are fluent in technology.  Three year olds can play games on computers, two year olds can sing ‘

Sesame Street

’ songs. This week, the six year old child of a Chinese-Malaysian friend showed me her new mobile phone (pink, with Miss Kitty emblazoned, of course). All people with access to electricity can switch on a light bulb. Billions are well-versed in the forms and content of television, movies, print media, and the images that advertise popular brands. Last night, a man from Uzbekistan, fluent in Uzbeq and Russian, drew pictures for me and I taught him the English words for spring, summer, fall, and winter. I showed him handouts and powerpoints I had compiled using graphics downloaded from the internet. We communicated surprisingly well as we shared familiarity with the same imagery.  Though we live now in the tropics, we both came from places with seasonal changes. We both drank Pepsi. We swam in the same pool.  If I can figure out how to get my CD burner working again, I will provide him with a CD of Word documents and Powerpoints to take home to study – or he can plug in his flashdrive to download them directly from my computer.

Meantime, I puzzle over the uniquely 21^st Century problems and frustrations never before faced by previous generations. I invoke the spirits of Tom Swift and Tom Edison, and request a little help from Bill Gates. Alternatively, if worse comes to worse, I will head for the nearest computer repair shop and continue to save up my pennies for the inevitable “next upgrade” to a new computer. Three guiding principles for the confirmed technophile that the Toms taught are that 1) there is always another alternative (even if it is just to give up); 2) if you hunt-and-peck persistently, you may be able to find an answer; 3) if you wait long enough -- as the speed and quantity of inventions multiply exponentially in this current age -- something new will be invented to solve your problem.

May the 21^st Century bring solutions to some of the greater issues: overpopulation, surpluses of manmade trash, overabundance of carbon dioxide leading to global warming, poverty, starvation, and the many other ills we face. My fervent hope is that the next generations with their fluent use of technologies  will use the tools for the planetary good. May creativity and inventiveness never go out of style!