Technological progress is like an axe in the hands of a pathological criminal. - Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
I’m not against progress. I like my house, for example, much better than a cave. But I’m not what you’d call an early adopter. From microwave ovens to cell phones, I have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into the modern world. Of all my reactionary battles, none has been more traumatic, more dramatic, and more humiliating than my thirty year battle with personal computers and the Internet.
Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. - George Orwell (1903-1950)
In the early 1980s, second husband took me to Georgia to meet the out-laws. His father had just bought a TRS-80, affectionately known as the Trash-80. I hooked it up to the old black and white television in the basement and spent a frustrating week teaching myself BASIC and writing a program to play the first five bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. At the end of the week, on the trip home, I told second husband that personal computing would never catch on.
Believing in progress does not mean believing that any progress has yet been made. - Franz Kafka (1883 - 1924)
Twelve years later, my forty-year-old Remington manual typewriter gave up the ghost. This was not entirely a bad thing, since the keys were so worn down it was impossible to distinguish between the letters a, e and s. Second husband wanted a home computer and talked me into buying an IBM desktop to replace my beloved Remington. Home computing, it seemed, had greatly improved. Aside from the wonders of word processing, the CPU made an excellent footrest. After much technological sturm und drang, we managed to get connected to the internet. I spent five minutes surfing and fifty five minutes waiting for screens to load over the phone line. I told second husband that the Internet would never catch on.
Is it progress if a cannibal uses knife and fork? - Stanislaw Lec (1909 - 1996)
Just before the turn of the century, second husband and I parted ways and I moved to the Netherlands. I’m mostly an instant gratification type, too impatient to wait out the turnaround time of snail mail. Staying in touch with friends back in North America soon resulted in crippling telephone bills. I decided it would be economically wiser to get email. I bought a cheap laptop computer, ordered DSL service, and learned that the Internet had greatly improved its speed of delivery. What it delivered, however, left much to be desired. Security software handled the viruses. I learned not to open any email offering watches, pharmaceuticals or guaranteed techniques for enlarging my organ. The few personal emails I did get were frequently garbled to the edge of legibility. I told myself (since I was living alone now) that email would never catch on.
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity. - Thor Heyerdahl ( 1914 - 2002)
Over the next eight years, the laptop became my financial life, and things got worse by leaps and bounds. My bank discontinued teller service, forcing me to use internet banking. My credit card issuers and pension fund providers had apparently hired exclusively deaf mutes, since the only way they could be contacted was via email or chat. I had accounts with Amazon, Microsoft, Symantec and every major airline in the world. Logon id’s and passwords proliferated to the point where they took up half my address book. Shit happened and I found myself wading through swamps of moronic FAQ’s trying to find out how to contact a REAL person; then punched my way through computerized menus to find the elusive REAL person; then spent hours, at ten cents a minute, listening to crappy hold music while waiting for REAL person to pick up the phone; then had to ask REAL person to repeat everything at least five times because I couldn’t understand their accent. It seemed obvious that no one in their right mind would choose to do business over the internet. I told myself (still living alone) that internet commerce would never catch on.
New roads; new ruts. - Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936)
In 2007, when I quit my job and moved to India, one of my co-workers suggested that I write a blog to keep people informed of my adventures. Given the number of people I knew, this seemed like a much more efficient method of staying in touch than handcrafting individual emails. I got myself a blogspot account and started up BrIndia. But efficiency did not ensue. I blogged. People commented. I answered comments, generating long explanatory email exchanges. I soon found myself tied to the laptop for two hours every day, blogging and emailing. This is insane, I told myself. No one with a real job has the time to hang out on the Internet all day.
Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long. - Ogden Nash (1902 - 1971)
Earlier this year, my first novel was bought by NAL. Any aspiring novelist will tell you that a publishing contract is the Holy Grail of writing, because it greatly improves the odds that someone, other than your mother or your best friend, will read your book. Publishers have editors to improve the quality of your book, artists to wrap an eye-catching cover around it, and sales forces to ensure bookstore buyers know it exists. For months I stumbled around in an ecstatic fog, convinced I’d surmounted the final hurdle on the path to literary fame and fortune.
Then I received the Penguin Author’s Guide to Online Marketing, sixty-four pages of advice for authors in the age of the Internet, and realized how much further the path stretched ahead of me.
I needed a blog. To this I assigned a daunt-factor of two. It would have been a zero, because I blogged in India, but now I’m writing about myself and there’s not much material to work with here.
I needed a website. I assigned this a daunt-factor of four: two because I had to learn enough HTML and CSS to write it, and two because I have all the artistic ability of a rock. Not one of those cool, igneous rocks with sparkly quartz bits either; I’m more of a dull gray sedimentary rock.
With the blog and website under my belt, I am now at the part of the guide that deals social-networking: Facebook, Myspace, Amazon Connect, YouTube, iTunes, Flickr, and , most terrifying of all, Twitter. Obviously I can’t do all this or I’ll never have time to write another book, or even brush my teeth. So the question is: where do I spend my social-networking hours?
Five of these options are easy to discard. I’m a writer, not a photographer, or a musician, or whatever it is they call people who make videos. Scratch Flickr and iTunes and YouTube. MySpace insists I tell them my year of birth. Hah! Like that's ever going to happen. The “learn more” link for Amazon Connect is broken, so I can’t learn enough to find out how to sign-up with them.
This leaves me with Facebook and the dreaded Twitter. On a scale of one to ten, these have a combined daunt-factor of at least thirteen, maybe twenty.
Let’s start with Facebook. I actually have a facebook account, and with all due respect to the millions of people who are “tagged” in photos, “like” other people’s status, and have sheep to trade in Farmville, I can’t quite see how any of this is going to encourage people to read my book. Who cares what I have for breakfast or how many pairs of shoes I own? (For the record, it’s toast and peanut butter most days and two pairs.) As for political opinions, favorite recipes, and interesting pets - I don’t have any. Which leaves me with posts like: “Hey! I just woke up!” and “Six pm and still sober! Yay me!”
On to Twitter. Seriously? Twitter? What, that is interesting, can possibly be said in 140 characters? Perhaps, if I had a cranky father prone to pithy sayings, Twitter would work for me. Sadly, my father died shortly after I was born, apparently unaware that by falling out a third floor window he was severely stunting my future social networking opportunities.
I’d like to tell myself (still living alone) that social networking will never catch on, but obviously it has. I suppose, like every other battle I’ve fought on the Internet, I’ll find a way to insinuate myself into the social network eventually. Meanwhile, you’ll just have to make do with a website and a blog.
A process which led from the amoebae to man appeared to the philosophers to be obviously a progress -- though whether the amoebae would agree with this opinion is not known. - Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
