Coming to Terms With Technological Change

Olivetti Lettera 22

For over thirty years I've been wondering how to approach emerging questions introduced by innovations in information technology.  At first (in the '80s) I accepted new-fangled objects like computers and screens almost without question. And then I happily embraced e-mail, primarily because it enabled me to keep in more frequent touch with my father, who had been an eager early-adopter. During the last fifteen or so years of his life (he died at 83 in 2004) we enjoyed a lively correspondence that had been enhanced by the ability to exchange messages much more quickly than we could by post--although we continued using the older tech in order to include family members who hopped on the bandwagon more slowly. 

We were both less receptive toward portable telephones, although I reluctantly bought an early Nokia when my mother was ill and I was teaching, although land-line phones sufficed for everything but emergencies. But borrowing a friend's mobile phone in 1995 for a solo road trip to California (only weeks before I underwent bypass surgery) made portability's uses even clearer. It still took some active persuasion for me to buy my first iPhone, but one of my students convinced me of its efficiency, and I fell under Apple's spell.  I still have that old silverback, which had to be replaced within a year or so, but have reluctantly upgraded only when I had to. It's really too bad that Apple was, from the beginning, so committed to planned obsolescence that it would never develop anything that didn't need to be modified on a frequent schedule. Fast tech was born at the dawn of the era of fast food, fast fashion, and ever-increasing waste.

Oddly enough, my first gig at the Art Institute of Dallas was teaching "Computer Literacy" in 1989. I'm not sure why I was hired, except that I had been a TA at UTD in the computer science lab before a real teaching assistantship opened up. But by the time I became a full-time humanities instructor, I had realized that a course website would help me communicate better with my students and make it possible to provide resources for them that our high-tech multi-media focused college couldn't yet supply. 

So I bought a domain, started learning how to use Adobe PageMill, and created a site that became known as "Owldroppings" (don't ask). I switched over to Adobe Creative Suite when I got a free teaching copy, and that provided me with better tools for design and image manipulation. A couple of students hosted the site over the years, and I eventually learned enough about maintaining it to take over its management. Not long after that, a colleague convinced me that I really needed to start a blog. And so, nearly nineteen years ago, on June 22, 2007, I wrote this: 

I swore I would never do this. Who wants to read my stuff, anyway? But pressures mount in an academic/technical environment, and I was seduced by somebody else's blog.

I grew more enthusiastic about the enterprise as I got into it; then, of course, life got in the way and my output dwindled. But I have kept it up, if intermittently. The websites not so much.

My distaste for other social media, however, has remained steadfast in most ways. I've never had a Facebook or Twitter account, having been pretty ferocious in my opposition to what they and similar platforms were putting out from the day they were launched, despite the fact that my children and many other family members eagerly opened accounts on one or more of them. 

I actually had an Instagram account for a few years because I thought it might be good for putting pictures up on the blog, but only ever used it to follow a few bookstores--and recently got rid of it altogether. There is a Quora account (I joined in 2011 because Ursula K. Le Guin had one; but she left shortly after I arrived), on which I still hold forth very occasionally on topics about which I have some expertise. There's also a Pinterest account because it's still a good curatorial tool and substitutes for collections of magazine clippings--although mine has no social value to me or anyone else. My only regret about using it is that when it gets bought up by some greedy megacorp that decides I don't buy enough stuff from the advertisers, I'm outta there and so are all my beguiling boards and images. My feed is increasingly being populated by AI Slop, however, so perhaps it won't take an EMP to drive me away or obliterate my collections.

Which brings me to my current conundrum, confession, and concession. (Don't smirk; I worked hard on that.) 

Remember that course website ("Owldroppings"), the construction of which convinced me that not all modern technology was a waste of time and effort?  It hung around the interwebs for several years, even after I retired, and a couple of my former students decided it was worth preserving. So they deposited bits of it onto The Internet Archive's wonderful, magical Wayback Machine. In the meantime I had redesigned the home page and renamed it "Owl's Farm (The Website)," considered some ideas about what could happen to it, and then let it sit.

I had also constructed a site for what I had once thought might be my final attempt at a doctoral dissertation: a riff on William Morris's utopian novel, News From Nowhere, complete with resources and other materials related to what I called More News From Nowhere. And because I was teaching both Morris's book and mine in a course called "Technology and Utopia" at AiDallas, I published the first draft online. And there it sat. Until last week.

Since early this year I've been trying to reclaim both sites and bring them back to life. But I kept having technical problems with my software (a pre-cloud version of Dreamweaver), my computers (two old Macs running old operating systems), my understanding of how FTP works, and my host (Go Daddy) with whom I've been doing business for twenty years. I got frustrated a couple of times, and backed off when I couldn't understand what I was doing. This lasted for about six months, but last week I decided to try again and was introduced to a new platform that I automatically said NO A THOUSAND TIMES NO to. But the particular salesman I talked to (they call them "Guides") engaged me in conversation long enough for him to get on the Wayback Machine, scrape my material off, slap it into the Ai program, and produce pages that weren't awfully different from what I would have done.

In essence, the program did--in about a half an hour total--everything I had been trying to do since I retired. I feel a bit like Sibling Dex meeting the robot Mosscap for the first time in A Psalm for the Wild Built (thank you, Becky Chambers)!  "Cheese" (my guide; not his real name, but close) managed to convince me, not by using ad-speak or some tech-salesperson language with which I am inadequately familiar, but by showing me. And it's not AI Slop, either. It's my sensibilities tidied up a bit and translated into a newer, cleaner version of what I had constructed all those many years ago. I can edit everything (even code, although it's not code-based), add my own graphics and images, and pretty it up if I want to. I've since been working on both sites as I think about what I want to happen with them, making changes, publishing them, and getting on with my life.

I still have major problems with the current artificial intelligence obsession. I'll go into those in some depth later. I'll also feature a discussion of some of it in the novel. But for now I'm back to writing and editing, and have built (along with my robot, who's very affable and polite, and probably needs a name) workable update of the originals. If you're curious about the earlier material, you can always visit the Wayback Machine, although accessing More News From Nowhere can be confusing, the text has changed significantly, and will not be uploaded until I'm ready for feedback. I also haven't tried looking at older versions of owlfarmer.com. 

Once again, however, the right person has talked me back from absolutism and stridency to a position of reasonableness. I still deplore the latest trends in visual manipulation, although perhaps charts might be a good outlet for "designers" who simply want to type in a few parameters and push a button. But for those of us who learned from scratch how to design and edit code and were pretty successful at it, and who are now older than dirt and not all that good at it any more, this alternative may provide a path forward.

More News From Nowhere* and "Owl's Farm: The Website" are now linked at the top of this blog. "Owl's Farm (The Blog)" and "Owl's Cabinet of Wonders" will stay on Blogger and undergo only a few modifications and updates.

I hope you folks who are still here will stay with me.  

*Note: I am well aware of Nick Cage's song of the same name; the two works share a source of inspiration (Morris's book) and possible thematic elements (according to the Wikipedia account), but I've never heard the song itself. I began working on the material that led to my story in 1992 when I started conducting research on Morris and his critique of modern technology, so I was way ahead of Cage with that title.

Image credit: My first text-producing machine ever was an Olivetti Lettera 22. The photo is from Wikipedia's page, because the one I still own is a rusty, scruffy mess.  My mother had a friend who was an Olivetti salesman in Taiwan, and he gave her the 1961 script version. She gave it to me, and I typed papers on it in college. One professor wrote on the cover of what was otherwise an excellent paper on John Chadwick's The Decipherment of Linear B, "This typewriter could drive a man to drink." Here's what it looked like:

I think there's a technological message in here. Somewhere.

Graphic Healing

I am amazed, every day that I teach, by the sheer variety of talents my students possess. A large number of them are budding (or even working) graphic designers, and most of them are thoughtful people with ambitions that range from the practical to the lofty, and have discussed with me what they perceive as a sort of "moral danger" attached to what they do, a concern a thoughtful person might have about any field in which technology and money are involved.

What are designers to do, after lumbering themselves with a five-figure debt that will, with interest, most likely run into six figures before it's finally paid off (depending on how they've financed their education)? The easy answer is to sell out to the highest bidder, ask no questions, and do what they're told for the next few years. After that, who knows?

But some of these people are already asking tough questions. How can I do what I love without adding to the myriad problems now facing this fragile planet? Graphic design as a profession is, after all, replete with potential problems. Printing can still involve the use of toxic chemicals, not all of which are disposed of properly (although alternatives are now available). Computers themselves are hardly "green" by nature--and even the most environmentally friendly of them may outsource jobs, impact wildlife habitat, and contain chemicals and materials that will eventually find their way into the waste stream. Not only that, but advertising in particular is a field that all too frequently preys upon human insecurities by manufacturing desire. Human beings like stuff, and most of the businesses that hire designers are involved in making stuff that advertisers are hired to help them sell: whether or not it's necessary, truly useful, or environmentally benign. In the worst cases, advertisers and designers are involved in promoting causes with which the individuals involved may disagree on moral, political, or religious grounds.

It's truly difficult to make choices with the potential for world-healing in an economy that seems to be bleeding away chances for decision-making. While the supermarket shelves may be stocked with seemingly limitless choices among breakfast cereals, there's no telling how long many jobs in the companies that sell these products will be available. Not that selling sugary, chemical-laden breakfast cereal is an ideal job--but it's the kind of job agencies produce.

If you're willing to take a little longer to retire the debt, several options present themselves. Working for non-profit institutions, especially those engaged in bettering the lives of others, may not pay as well as working for Big Advertising, but it generally does pay a salary. You get to meet like-minded people, and work for change at the same time you get to use your skills and talents. But if you do have to settle for a job with The Man, you can still help by doing pro bono work for something you care about. If you freelance, you can build a clientèle of nonprofit groups by charging on a sliding scale, offering your services at lower rates for groups doing work you believe in. You can also focus a portion of your portfolio on "good works" that show off your skills and your commitment at the same time. This runs the risk of alienating folks who don't agree with your causes, but you probably wouldn't want to work for those people, anyway--right? Your portfolio should not just show off your skills; it should provide potential employers with an idea of who you are, and what motivates you.

Asking the right questions can also help make decisions about jobs. During interviews, designers can certainly ask about a company's mission, about the diversity of its workforce, about its clients. Many companies are developing "greener" policies and jumping on the environmental bandwagon as a way of promoting themselves; discussing these issues can help you determine whether their interest is superficial (purely for promotional purposes), or whether they're truly committed to lessening the company's impact on the planet.

In other words, as corporations become more and more concerned about their public images, it may be easier and easier to find jobs that don't compromise designers' priciples. When you have choices, and the best among you will always have choices (well, unless the economy completely tanks, and then we're all in trouble), opt for the job that not only matches your skillset, but is also compatible with your philosophical understanding of the world--even if it doesn't pay as much as a company that doesn't fit as well.

Employment in the field of graphic design is not, by any means, restricted to advertising. Web design, illustration, technical drawing and design, communications media, and education are all fields graphic designers enter, and some offer fewer moral challenges than others. Even if your life's ambition is to design skateboards or teeshirts, you can find yourself in a position to choose materials, and these choices can be made in terms of environmental and/or social impact. Small efforts can often produce significant results.

Think of the promotional possibilities: Joe's Earth-friendly Skateboards, sustainably built, using 85% recycled materials, or Emily's Earth-Shirts: 100% Organic Cotton and Natural Dyes. Donate part of your profits to the World Wildlife Fund or Heifer International, and you'll double your impact! Hell, I'll even buy one (tee-shirt, that is . . . don't think I'll ever get on a skateboard again).

Better yet, think even more deeply about what you're doing, and choose a path that leaves the world less full of stuff. We probably don't need more tee shirts and skateboards, after all, or at least not all that many of them. But surely we can find ways of using design talents to foster sustainable living, by reducing waste and increasing the longevity of what we manufacture. In order to find ways of living that minimize our impact on the planet, and jobs that don't add to the problems that already exist, the first step involves thinking carefully about what we want, what we need, and how we can achieve an appropriate balance between the two.

This is what education is about, and why my students have to take general education courses that introduce them to philosophical concepts related to their fields. In view of this mission, as a general studies instructor I'm assigning the following to get my graphic design and web folk headed down the right path:

In addition to my blog, please see this one: Slow Making, which considers craft as lifework, not just as employment. You might also read "Fear of Not Having Had" in the most recent issue of Orion magazine, which explores the culture of accumulation to which we belong, and raises questions that should be part of your career decision-process.

More discussion to follow. See you in class.

Photo credit: First Aid in 1920 and 1929, from the Meyers Blitz Lexikon, via Wikimedia Commons.