low tech

I actually prefer the low technology to the high. I’m a pencil sort of girl as opposed to notes in a blackberry. I like ice cream cones rather than a low calorie, factory processed, fudgecicle on a stick. I want my paper Sierra Club calendar, not iCal. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to give up the pictures I get to see each week in a paper calendar. It’s a small bit of pleasure taken away by the electronic environment. The new storage is easier and smaller, but the retrieval is always riskier. I can put my hands on a note I wrote 44 years ago making a bet with a friend about who’d be married first (not me). But I no longer have any way to access my dissertation stored on five and a quarter inch floppies and composed in WordPerfect. (WordPerfect, by the way, does not merit a spellcheck underline as it’s obviously now a “word” in our vocabulary.) The virtual world we inhabit now leads us to believe that the electronic is real and the real is merely stone-age sentimentalism. It leads us to reverse metaphorical and literal meanings. When we say “Jane comes home from school and literally glues herself to the television,” we mean figuratively. And when we use “figuratively” we mean literally. Metaphor is turned inside out and accomplishment is reduced to moving and storing pixels.