My Life and Technology
According to reports from my mom, my first technology was a play stove. She awoke one cold morning when I was about 3 (1962, Philadelphia, winter) to find me attempting to cook bacon, limp and raw, on the tiny tin stove.
According to reports from my mom, my first technology was a play stove. She awoke one cold morning when I was about 3 (1962, Philadelphia, winter) to find me attempting to cook bacon, limp and raw, on the tiny tin stove.
Considering the importance of food in our family, this makes sense to me. If you can’t eat it or use it to talk about food while cooking (phone), or do it enough to get hungry (skiing), or look up recipes (cookbook) or find photos of French pastries (food blogs), or actually fry an egg with it (stoves) what good is it?
Perhaps this is why I am not impressed with smart phones. When my husband rushed towards me in the Portland airport last Thanksgiving (food, again) to show me his new SMART phone, I watched his face in amazement, trying hard to imagine a piece of black plastic stirring this level of excitement. After he explained its other worldy ability to locate Orion and other celestial bodies, I looked at him and said “Let me know when it can bake a cake.”
While today is not the perfect day to bake a cake or anything else with our electric stove, it is a perfect day to contemplate the role of technology in my life. I am writing this with a #2 pencil in a spiral notebook. Abnormally cold temperatures have caused havoc with the electric grid, requiring rolling electricity blackouts.
Snow on the ground. No school. No electricity. No internet. I am relegated to technologies of the 20th century and before:
Pencil (circa 1560’s England)
Paper (ancient China)
It’s a Luddites dream come true! Everybody seemed to get along just FINE with these for hundreds of years. In fact my husband and I got along for SIX YEARS without electricity or running water while living in our small house (250 square feet) on 5 acres north of Taos, New Mexico. We heated our cozy love shack with wood and cooked with a 1950’s propane stove. Racing out in the snow to fire up the generator on a cold winter night was more of a weekly event. We may be the only couple in America who watched the first four seasons of Lost on a Macbook powered by a generator! If we had a fight, there was no place to go, no screen to use to check out and ignore each other. So when I use modern technology now, this is my reference point.
I am not for or against technology. They are TOOLS. We now have more sophisticated tools. To be enthralled I need to see or hear or feel a human touch as part of the end result; the smear of pencil lead, the smell of cake, the transfixing power of images or the sound of music.
After the play tin stove, aside from the Chatty Cathy talking doll I received at the age of four, my next technology memories revolve around music and images.
A year after their famous visit to the Ed Sullivan show, I recall holding the Beatles album Hard Days Night. A couple years later, at eight years old, I walked to the local Thrifty drug and purchased Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Anxious to open it and play it as soon as I got home, I tore open the shrink wrap while still in our driveway. The album slid out and smashed on the cement sidewalk. For my eleventh birthday I wore a white faux leather Nehru jacket and go-go boots and my girlfriends and danced to the White Album’s Birthday song over and over and over, played on my dad’s fancy stereo. Later when I purchased my first stereo with money earned babysitting, I loved to pick up the arm and move the needle back to a favored track and listen to it again. On family vacations in our Lincoln Continental we played eight-track tapes of Glen Campbell singing The Witchita Lineman or Dionne Warwick ‘s version of I Say a Little Prayer.
While today most computers are equipped with simple movie editing software, in the 1960’s our family made 8 mm movies by hand! A crazy psychiatrist friend of our family had an annual contest, to coincide with the Oscars. Our movies included insane stunts my dad had coerced from my mom (he once drove down the block at 6 am in her ski gear attached to skis and clamped into the ski rack her arms flailing against the grey sky). Often they would return from the party, slightly drunk and in their sexy black evening wear, holding a gold statue we’d won for Best Film! My dad edited the films by hand, and I’d help by holding the film spool on a pencil while he cut the bits together.
I didn’t edit again until I took a 16mm film class in Paris in 1977. My film studies took me next to the University of Illinois, Chicago where I learned VHS video tape editing and analog image processing. This training helped me land an editing gig years later, making documentaries on Buddhism for Mongolian television.
In 2000 I had not touched any editing equipment for over 10 years. VHS tape was gone. No problem! My now friend Linda Hattendorf, documentary filmmaker (http://www.thecatsofmirikitani.com/aboutMakers.htm) was the editor at Dharma Vision. My new boss said Linda would train me to use editing software Final Cut Pro. On my first day at work, Linda popped into the office, sat with me for about an hour, clicked and pointed around a screen littered with confusing icons and then she said “I have a massage appointment. I gotta go. You’ll be fine.” That was my ‘training’. The next few weeks were challenging, but transfixed by the beauty of the Buddhist world of Mongolia it was easy stare at a screen in a dark room and forget this was a ‘job.’
The hell... day 1 again. My boss is no where to be found. She's in an airport on her way to Florida to visit her husband. She's left me a long, long list of things I need to get together, documents - verifications, taxes, income statements, details details details. I have to scan and fax. For hours. It is overwhelming. I hate it!
I would rather be home baking a cake!!!
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