Luddite Leanings

The ire of the Luddite in me has been rising, of late. Though I adore my technology—the computer, the cell phone, the PDA, the stereo, the flat screen television and my KitchenAid mixer—I am more and more troubled by the subtle (and not so subtle) changes this technology makes not only in my life, but how I think about life. I’ve been thinking about emails today. And what disturbed me was the impermanence of the communication. Oh, I know that in a pinch all emails are recoverable. I know government officials who despair of this reality; there are not a few congress people whose jobs have been lost when their emails would not disappear. Roth’s novel The Human Stain turns on an irrecoverable, embarrassing, and incriminating email message which must be explained because it will not simply go away.

But, really, what we write in an email disappears by a thoughtless (or even thoughtful) mouse and/or key click. Though I carefully craft my words (we carefully craft our words, don’t we?), so are they disappeared with absolutely no real physical trace. Not the smoke of a burnt page, or the violence of crumpled pages, or the air-splitting tear of paper into smaller and smaller remnants. No confetti to litter our floors or our hearts. Indeed, this reality leads me to care cursorily about the messages I compose in the first place: someone is going to delete it all too quickly! Oh, our email messages exist somehow as excited electrons somewhere, but there is no physical file into which the message goes for the sake of posterity. Oh yes, as I have suggested, government emails are probably more sacrosanct and recoverable, but what will the rest of us do now that letters have ceased being a primary form of communication and been replaced by ephemeral emails. What will historians do? Will there be no ribboned bound boxes into which letters are put, no stuffed filed drawers filled with correspondence stained by coffee, ink, fingerprints, and tears? What if I get a lovely email and wish to return to it again and again: I can save it, I suppose, in some file on my computer, but there is nothing to touch, no physical evidence onto which I can hold of the reality of another human hand anywhere. I can’t carry the message to sit with before the fire sipping tea or brandy and desiring some sympathy. Rather, if I want to savor the message, I have to sit in front of this bloody screen in order to even see it, and here there is no romance or feeling. And to get here I have too often to sludge my way through the cold and snow.

More, the technology has come to mean that I can never be alone, but am eminently findable everywhere. Or worse, that I am eminently alone because my children keep ignoring me to text their friends who are texting them. No matter where we are, there they are, too.

And what about civility? Every time I answer the phone in public, I make a public statement that everything out there can be disappeared at my response to the ring. Everytime I make a phone call, I disappear the world. And everytime my phone rings, like Banquo’s ghost at Macbeth’s banquet, in my quiet times I am beset by visitations.

I’ve promised myself not to answer the phone when I am dealing with a salesclerk. I declare myself Free to be You and Me. I have begged my children to text me only when there is a ‘crisis,’ a term whose definition we haven’t quite negotiated yet.