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| Olivetti Lettera 22 |
I've been wondering how to approach the questions introduced by information technology for over thirty years. At first (in the '80s) I accepted innovations like computers and screens almost without question. And then I happily accepted e-mail--primarily because it enabled me to keep in 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 so 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 less receptive toward portable telephones, but I reluctantly bought an early Nokia when my mother was ill and I was teaching. Borrowing a friend's mobile phone in 1995 for a solo trip to California (only weeks before I underwent bypass surgery) made mobility's uses quite clear. But I had never been fond of the intrusiveness of the telephone in general, so it took some convincing for me to buy my first iPhone (I still have it--an old silverback; too bad Apple would never produce anything that would work for this long, or I'd probably still be using it). But one of my students convinced me of its efficiency, and once more I fell under Apple's spell and those people still own me.
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. A couple of students hosted the site over the years, and I eventually learned enough about coding and design to take over its management. Not long afterward 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.
Of course, I've been at it ever since, although I grew much 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, sometimes intermittently. But my distaste for other social media 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 most of my family members had accounts on one or more of them.
I actually had an Instagram account for a few years because I thought it would 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 it in 2011 because Ursula K. Le Guin had one; but she left shortly after I arrived), and a Pinterest account, which substitutes for collections of magazine clippings, and which has no social value to me or anyone else. My only regret about it is that when it goes, so do all the pretty pictures I've saved over the years. But I spend less and less time on my feed, now that it's increasingly polluted with Ai Slop.
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 after I retired, and a couple of my students decide 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), had some ideas about what could happen to it, and then let it sit.
I had also constructed a website 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.
Ever since January I've been trying to get back to 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 software), 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 to get on the Wayback Machine, scrape my material off, slap it into the Ai program, and produce pages that weren't that far off 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 (so 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've been working on them both 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 whole 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) a workable update of the original. If you're curious about that (the original), you can always visit the Wayback Machine, although accessing More News From Nowhere can be confusing, and the text has changed significantly. 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 have no fondness for the latest in visual manipulation, although charts seem to be a good outlet for Ai. 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 may be a way forward.
More News From Nowhere* and Owl's Farm: The Website are now linked at the top of this blog.
*Note: I am well aware of Nick Cage's song of the same name; they 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 favorite text-producing machine of all is the Olivetti Lettera 22. The photo is from Wikipedia's page, because the one I still own is a bedraggled 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 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.
