A phrase I’ve found myself repeating to friends and family from time to
time recently is that “some things used to be better”. As a
technologist, and an optimist, I’m normally very positive about the
future, but lately I’ve come to think about the place some modern
technology has in our lives as increasingly negative. I’m rethinking,
yet again, our relationship with the many devices we’ve invited into our
lives.
While I was pondering this topic and waiting for the mechanic to finish
with my car I wandered into a second-hand store and found this beauty of
a machine on sale for $5. Of course I brought it home. The typewriter
is a Montgomery Ward Signature 440T, made in Nagoya, Japan in
1968. It appears to be
in perfect working order, although it’s extremely dirty inside. My
intention is to restore it as best I can, which for the moment I believe
means taking it apart and cleaning it, then putting it back together.
I’ll put a new ribbon on it, and from there I think it’ll be ready to
type.
Perhaps I’ll send out a letter or two with it. Maybe address envelops. I
don’t know that it’s really got a lot of practical use other than
looking cool on my desk, but it’s a project, a hobby, and things done
for fun don’t need to be practical.
The machine is entirely mechanical. No electricity, and it’s lasted
fifty years so far. I imagine it could last another fifty if I take care
of it. I don’t think I can say the same about my iPhone or the iMac I’m
writing this on. Eventually the components in both devices will wear
out. The battery will fail to take a charge, the screen will start to
fade, the drives will start to give errors. Things break over time, and
in our disposable culture the answer is to throw it away and buy another
one. Meanwhile, the typewriter I bought for five bucks has lasted for
fifty years.
It’s a single-purpose machine. Created back before attention was a
sparse commodity. Before the Internet, before smartphones, before
twitter or facebook. All gears and pulleys, levers and hammers. You have
to think hard about what you are writing, and not make any mistakes
while typing. If you do you have to pull the entire page out and start
over again.
I’ve been thinking about what we’ve lost, and what we’ve gained over the
years. It’s true that the Internet enables new business models, my own
included, but are we really better off now? I’m not sure we can
objectively say that the Internet has made the world a better place.
Have smartphones made us happier? Research says we are now more alone
and isolated than ever, with increasing rates of depression and
negativity. Politically we are at each others throats, failing to see
the world as it is and instead seeing it through the lens of
partisanship. 24-hour news creates catastrophes where there were none,
everything is an emergency.
In the middle of all this, we are struggling to find peace, happiness,
acceptance, and love. The Amish reject any technology that they feel
would pull them apart instead of bringing them closer together. I think
they are on to something there. Of course, I have no intention of
converting, but it does leave me wondering “where do we go from here?”
I’ve said for a while that I thought the best technology was nearly
invisible, silently enhancing our lives in the background while we go
about our day. Unfortunately, today’s technology has been developed to
provide what people want, but too often ignores what they need. I
wonder if what we need most is a cultural shift to view the negative
aspects of technology as being as harmful to us as cigarettes and
alcohol. Sure, the smoker loves to smoke, but it’s killing him. Looks
like all of us love social media too, but it’s breaking us from the
inside. There’s something about the psychology of being online that
changes our behavior in ways that are completely aberrant.
The affects of computers and the internet on our society are
compounding. My wife is a teacher, and the school started giving the
kids computers years ago. Now she’s thinking about going back to books
and paper just so she can get the kids to pay attention to the class and
not be distracted by what the computer provides. What will happen to
these kids in the next ten to fifteen years? Will they be able to
concentrate on hard problems at all?
For thousands of years people lived pretty much the same from one
generation to the next. Technology has always advanced, but never so
fast as it has in the past one-hundred years. So much has changed at
such an unprecedented pace. Our psyches and our bodies are not prepared
for what the technology has given us.
It’s possible that I’m getting to a certain age where people tend to
reminisce about how things were when they were young, but I don’t feel
like I’m quite that old yet. It’s just a different world now. Is it the
world we want it to be? I wonder. I look at my typewriter project and
wonder.
