THE ROCKWOOD FILES : Dealing with road bumps while navigating an electronic world
Posted on Sunday, July 6, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/Living/66827/
It’s funny how we call this the “ age of technology, ” seeing as how age and technology are so often not on friendly terms. My dad has drawn a line in the technological sand. He won’t check his cell phone’s voice mail. Refuses to do it. Won’t budge. We’ve all offered to show him how to do it many times to no avail. He’ll carry the thing around with him, but if he misses a call he figures they’ll just call back if it’s important.
We tease him about it, but the truth is, most of us are just like him. We all have our technology threshold. My mom’s threshold stops short of her new VCR / DVD machine. Her old machine was a “ VCR Plus” model (obsolete in today’s technology ), and it gave her the ability to enter a simple code from the TV Guide into her remote and — prestowhamo — the show would be automatically recorded. She loved its simplicity, and she’s still missing the machine she understood. She’s had her new VCR for nearly a year now, and it’s still not hooked up to the television.
My threshold stops just before text messaging. As a writer, I ought to embrace texting as one more avenue for written communication. But I hate the whole idea of it. I’ve never done it, and I don’t want to try. I don’t want to type out words on my phone. Those little number buttons can’t give me the same satisfying clickety-click-click of a computer keyboard. I’m a purist — an English major back in college — and I just can’t bring myself to hack the English language into a zillion little abbreviations like CUL 8 R and LOL. (I don’t like LOL, by the way. If the message doesn’t move me to Laugh Out Loud, then an abbreviated instruction is darn sure not going to do it. )
My theory about age and technology revolves around brain hardening. You know how they say a baby’s brain is like a sponge, soaking up vast amounts of new information in the first year alone ? Perhaps, as we get older, our brains begin to firm up a little. I’m in my mid-30, and I’d say my brain is like an overripe cantaloupe — mostly firm but still a little squishy here and there. When I get to be my dad’s age, I imagine my brain will have evolved into something like a brick — full of solid information but only penetrable by a very strong, persistent drill. (Hey, Dad ! LOL. )
I’m not saying this theory holds true in every single case, so if you’re a techsavvy 90-year-old with an iPhone, don’t bother texting me a nasty message because I won’t get it anyway. We’ve already covered that. I’m just saying that people younger than 30 seem to have very malleable brains along with a true hunger for new technology. My spongybrained 6-year-old can learn how to play a new video game just by walking past it in the store. Why ? Because he wants it. He wants it real bad.
I, on the other hand, don’t really want to write 4 COL (for crying out loud ) on my cell phone. My mom doesn’t want a new VCR. She just wants the old one back because it recorded “ Dancing with the Stars” when she told it to. And my Brickhead — I mean my dad — doesn’t want to learn how to check the invisible answering machine that lives inside his phone. So who am I to throw the first electronic stone ?
All we can do is strive to push past our individual comfort zones and embrace the truly necessary technologies, and those may be different for each of us. We can hope like crazy that the kids are going to grow up and be able to translate all this tech talk into something we can understand. Because if technology is the new frontier, we have to be willing to blaze a trail. And that’s my. 02 (two cents’ worth ).
L 8 RG 8 R (Later, ’gator ).
Gwen Rockwood is a regionally syndicated freelance columnist. Send comments to her at rockwoodfiles @ cox. net or write to her in care of this newspaper. Archives of The Rockwood Files can be found at www. nwaMotherlode. com.