Thoughts on Technology and Writing II

Continuing from where I left off yesterday, by the time I sold The Singing Fire, I was tired of the conflicts and passions on my list serves and had signed off most of them. (As an aside, the best and most reasonable list-serve I've encountered is one devoted to people who collect and fix vintage sewing machines.) It had been more exciting than Solitaire, but like Solitaire the obsession waned. No more procrastinating that way, but something new was coming. Motherhood and high speed.

My hardy old Toshiba worked, and in fact still works, but Windows 95 was obsolete and inadequate for many websites. It was time for a new laptop and my own internet account. At the start of 2003 I was the mom of a new baby and a pre-schooler. No more dial-up for me. With dsl service, I discovered real time chat, and it was better than a list serve for overcoming isolation. More absorbing. All consuming. To this day, A remembers how attached I was in those years to the aggravations and camaraderie of that online community. Sadly, he called it the new normal. I was involved then in an intense period of dealing with the unmet aspects of my past. But eventually healing happened and the chat obsession waned like the others. By the time it did, I'd worn out my keyboard, and, rather than spend several hundred on a new one, got another laptop.

These were the years that blogging and then social media exploded. Amazon, Ebay, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, Skype. I checked back into the old list serves I used to follow and discovered that activity had dwindled from hundreds of messages a day to a handful. I became a blogger around the time that blogging was said to have had its day and twitter was all the rage. I joined twitter when it, too, was no longer cutting edge. But I'm not aware of any new online service that's displaced it. Rather what's new is mobility: the smart phone, the IPad. You never have to be away from the internet. Now everyone, from kids to their teachers, can enjoy the same privilege of procrastination that, as a writer, I've enjoyed for years. I wonder if they'll experience the same sort of trajectory I have, getting absorbed and then eventually bored.

Their smart phones are a more honest device than my laptop because they don't purport to be a significant work tool. You see most of what my laptop can and does do now isn't work related. It is tangentially a work tool and that is confusing. People are advised not to work in their bedrooms (though I do) because it's said to mix up sleep mode with alert mode. And yet shouldn't that apply to our work as well? How can anyone expect to focus on work with games, shopping, music, videos, pictures, news and information about everything in the universe right there in front of her?

I just got a new laptop. For the first time I didn't buy a computer a generation out of date to save money. I was so excited! I fretted, waiting for my order to be made and shipped from Lenovo in China. Would it work? Would it be as good as I thought? (The voice of wisdom inside said, "It's a tool".) But I couldn't wait. Finally it came and I spent a couple of days getting it up and running, transferring files, fixing up my last laptop and the one before that (with a new keyboard bought cheaply on ebay) for my kids.

My new computer is fast and beautiful. I'm enamoured of it. Right now I'm listening to classical music, feeling the perfect pressure of the keyboard, admiring the purple taskbar and the thumbnail images that smoothly pop up when my cursor passes over the icons of open programs: Firefox with "edit post", Word with "draft 1″, Windows Media Player with "Cello Sonata."

But here's the thing. To my surprise, I'm turning it off more than I have any computer I've had except for that first old Texas Instruments 286. I am still reading blogs and news via twitter and checking email, but then I want it off. There isn't any new obsession. Is it over? So it would seem, at least for now. Common sense would suggest that researchers are working on the next big thing in virtual reality. Could simulated environments become the next rage? Perhaps–or something else. But not for me, not today. I've got a dentist appointment this afternoon, which I hate even though it's just a cleaning, and no smart phone can do it for me.

Spring is here. The air is changing. The 3d world beckons. Taxes are coming due and I have papers to sort. On Sunday I rollerbladed to the library with my kids and I wasn't as scared as the day before. I can sort of stop if I'm going slowly. My first draft is open, a blank page calling me. Scary, yes, but I can sort of stop on my inline skates–surely I can cut a deal with a blank page.

A radical notion struck me while reading James Wood's How Fiction Works. What if what people are really looking for is literature? Absorption, sympathy, engagement with a cast of characters, the rise and fall of emotion, horizons broadened from an easy chair. You know what makes me smile? The thought that the next big thing, eventually, might be books.

Filed under: Interesting, Literary, Personal Tagged: technology and writing