Luddites

It’s rather easy to see how people could be that way.  Originally, it was a very painful time, the very cusp of history so to speak, when industrialization was a life or death matter.  I can’t help but have some admiration for those feeble attempts to fight it, but it was always a losing battle.

And there are many parallels to today.  It isn’t industrialization, it’s globalization, and that has been painful too.  But without any evil biases involved, the history of all species on earth is Adapt or Die, and always has been.  Whether it’s a machine (like a mechanized loom) or a computer, you have to learn to understand it and work with it, or it will defeat you.

On a smaller, not yet life-or-death scale (notice I say, not yet), it’s similar.  I know people who don’t have smartphones, Kindles or IPads, Bluetooths, and in some cases, not even computers.  Think about that.  And if you don’t have a TV (I know some of them too, or at least I’ve read about them), how do you get news?  Word of mouth?  The newspaper?

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that the main reason people don’t have any of these devices is not because they think we’ve lost contact with nature.  It’s because they’re scared of them.  They’re afraid they won’t understand how they work, and will be too embarassed to ask.  Pride is truly a Deadly Sin.

Just as one example, I’ve been having a problem with my smartphone, and emailed Sprint.  About the time I was ready to hit send, it said don’t email us if one of your problems is an inability to connect to the Internet.  Which was my exact problem.  What the hell.  I sent it anyway.  And to my complete astonishment, they replied in less than 24 hours and I fixed it.

So.  When I have a problem like this, I think, I thought technology was supposed to make my life easier.  Instead, I feel like I’m spending a lot of time in the care and feeding of my devices.  And don’t get me started on chargers.  I am forever charging something, or having to remember to charge something.

But when they are charged and happy and not malfunctioning (ha!), they actually do make my life easier and they enrich it.  If I want a book I can’t find at the library, I can have it in one minute on the Kindle.  Usually.

As frustrating as it can get, I am not going back to pencils and legal pads.  And I have a funny story about pencils and legal pads I’ll tell later.