Thursday, May 6: Femme Fatale
FACEBOOK ’EM, DANNO
by Deborah Elliott-Upton
I have friends. Or at least I’m told I do on facebook.com My virtually-minded friends said, “Everyone is doing it,” and although Mom always said I didn’t need to do what everyone else was doing, I joined. Just as I became one of the Facebook group, the Facebook group was said to have been dropped by the young and hip who are now Twittering away somewhere else. Facebook is supposedly composed of only older people now – actually the term was old geezers, but that sounds so harsh. I think I may have been invited too late to this technological party.
Never trust anyone over thirty. – mantra of the Sixties quoted by someone, somewhere who was decidedly under thirty and is currently in his mid-sixties and wondering if he can trust anyone under thirty now
Technology moves quickly and waits for no one. Have you seen those commercials where barely more than toddlers are taking digital pictures and scanning them into a computer, making a composite of the images and printing out one huge photo? I don’t know how to do that. I can scan photos and even know how to work my digital camera, but sometimes I can’t find where I saved the photos on my computer. Pre-K kiddos are making me feel left behind.
I know more than one writer – and darn good ones – that still enjoy writing freehand on legal pads. Those keeping journals are also a dying breed as many have moved to online blogs where the words closest to our hearts once kept under lock and key in a diary are now broadcast to the world in cyberspace. When was the last time you received an honest-to-goodness letter from someone who wasn’t running for office or offering you the biggest deal of your life if only you’d send a check for $4,000 to their Nigerian address? I miss letters from friends. “We’ll always have e-mail,” they promise, but it isn’t the same.
Do you think this generation’s children will someday find a picture of a pen or pencil in a history book and wonder what those are?
Handwriting is getting harder to read, too. No one teaches penmanship beyond basics. I suppose it isn’t needed for most, but a writer wants to autograph books and wouldn’t it be nice if the reader could then make out the letters and words? By the way, how does one autograph an e-book?
This probably makes you think I’m not a fan of technology. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I am amazed by what people are able to do with teeny-tiny computer chips. I don’t understand them or how they work, but I am happy to benefit from them. Think about having to write entire books on a typewriter. A manual. Without a correcting tape or ribbon. And having to make carbon copies. Hmm, I don’t think so.
Considering that, how did writers manage to finish short stories, much less novels? Oh, well, perhaps the strain wasn’t lost on Poe or Hemingway, but then, they didn’t know any better because there wasn’t any better.
I’m embracing technology as fast as I can and happy to learn new ways to travel the Internet highway. Maybe I should learn to Twitter. Until then, I have my friends here and on Facebook. If you’d like to join me over there on Facebook. (It’s just past our CB offices and take a left past the Murder, Inc. Building – or take the shortcut by going to facebook.com.) I can always use more friends ( especially if you share technological skills) and I don’t even care if you’re over thirty. There are plenty of us old geezers there and we have the best stories to share.
Anyone else notice that while we have more time-saving devices than at any point in history, we seem to have less time than at any point in history?
We are consuming ourselves at an alarming rate, but nobody notices. We all say, “Hmm, takes like chicken.”
And here’s a little secret… Twitter has been around forever. The technology simply got better. We used to call it “chat rooms.”
The worst thing about typing a manuscript on a typewriter was making a mistake on the copy to be submitted. If you wanted a neat, clean copy it meant typing the entire page again. Mistakes never occurred on the first few lines, only the last two or three.
I used to use different colors of mimeograph paper for each draft, then forget which was which. Now you are always working on the final draft. So technology is great, but I refuse to text or Twitter. Don’t even have a cell phone. It’s hard enough to hear on a real phone.
Chat rooms, huh? Who knew? I thought those were mainly for people trying to hook-up online. sigh I do think we are in the equivalent to the Industrialisation period in the late 1800’s-1920’s. I imagine everything seemed suddenly quick-paced then, too. I agree with Paul: if we’re doing everything so much faster, where is the extra free time we should be saving?
LOL – this article speaks directly to me, she of the old school ways!! I just joined Facebook myself and refuse to learn something new so soon…I don’t write on a legal pad, though, so I guess that’s progress!
I had a very successful author trying to convince me Twitter was worth my time. “It’s the greatest thing – you can talk with anyone in the world. You type whatever you’re doing at the moment, or they do the same. People can see what Neil Diamond is having for lunch.”
“See it?” I said.
“Well, no, but Neil can text what he’s eating. Anyone can text anything.”
I said, “So, it’s a bunch of people standing around chatting, only it’s done electronically.”
“YES! That’s exactly it! An electronic cocktail party twenty-four seven.”
“That’s a chat room,” I said. “Only instead of having to enter a specific chat room, you just join Twitter.”
He stared blankly at me. “Well, it’s more than that,” he finally said.
I waited.
He thought.
I waited.
He said, “Yeah, I guess it is the same. But it just seems a lot cooler now.”
I don’t want to know what Neil Diamond is having for lunch.
Glad to have you on Facebook. You’re my friend. ;-p
Debating on Twitter, but then I begin to wonder who cares what I am eating for lunch. I am a rather interesting person, but that seems to be taking it too far. Heck, I don’t care what I have for lunch day to day.
All of our free time is spent using time freeing devices. Then you get hooked on them, because you forget how to function without them.
My penmanship is horrible unless I slow down and take the time to do it right. Much easier to type, so we forget how to write. Do people even validate signatures on checks anymore?
Only started texting this year. Blackberry is nice with the full keyboard. Who wants to hit the same key multiple times to scroll through letters. Why we abbreviate things. Too lazy to spell it out. Next we forget how to spell.
Thank God for spell check.
So now we save time by texting, but we stopped communicating face to face. Verbal communication is dying off. The written word is still around but getting shorter everyday.
Great post Deborah.
Ever since used a hammer to take apart a clock trying to find the tick-tock when I was about six years old, I have loved gadgets and technology. I’m currently trying to set up a media center in my living room using Apple’s TV and converting my old VHS tapes to DVD. Except for reading, I probably spend more time fooling around with my digital cameras, DVD players (more than one), and computer software, sometimes just to see what the software will do.
But, I do not plan to buy an iPhone or GPS. Reading about Amazon’s new Kindle DX, I was almost persuaded that maybe I should try it until I read the $489.00 price. Some gadgets, like e-readers, just don’t appeal to me.
I’m not sure I’d like Facebook (my spell check hasn’t caught up to many new words). I don’t like talking on the phone because I prefer face to face. And I truly hate the computer voice when I call a company. It seems face to face communication is rapidly disappearing.
I’m not a gadget person but I love my ‘puter. I am on Facebook because of students. People have found me from my past and its been interesting, to say the least. To say the most, it is amusing to see what “young” people say on this type format. It may well come back to haunt them. But then I watch too much SVU-like TV.
I don’t like GPS thingies although there have been 2 other women in my marriage. Maggie and Young Maggie. Those are two Magellean GPS thingies I bought for husband. I never figured out why he wanted them because “he” knows directions!
Enjoyed your column.
Will all the electronic gadgets and programs such as Twitter and whatever comes next eventually put an end to writing because no one will have time for it?
I’m a total luddite who waited to even get into e-mail and word processing but now I admit it comes in handy! Don’t think I’ll twitter, I’m lucky to be able to get the voicemail on my cellphone to work!
Great piece. I used to tell my students that while public life is more extensively documented than ever before, private life has never been so little documented. Even before e-mail, telephone conversations were eating up information that once would have been recorded in letters. And how many of the e-mails and blogs and tweets and so forth will survive as the technology changes, and even if they do, can they possibly be as full and informative as letters and journals written in a slower-paced, more thoughtful time? One of the great ironies of spell-check and word processing is that it should have ensured that published materials would be totally free of error, but in fact, the state of editing and proof-reading in today’s published material (books especially) is disgraceful compared to the standard of fifty years ago. Word processing and the Internet are great advances if used properly. I wrote a lot of short stories and two novels on a typewriter, but everything since has been composed directly into the computer.
Our first computer purchase was for my husband and the business. Little by little, I started dabbling in “working” on the computer with short stories, then a novel, then another. One day — a day that lives in infamy around my house –, I innocently said something about my computer. It was like one of those E.F.Hutton commercials where everything stopped. Each upgraded computer since has been dubbed mine, even though other family members use it daily, also. I would not want to be without my computer. I am totally addicted.