Cursed Cursive

The local newscast recently put up a viewers’ poll, asking the question, “Should chilren continue to be taught cursive writing in BC schools?” I didn’t see it, but Ter did, and her first thought was, if it has anything to do with spelling, you guys have failed!

Spelling should definitely stay in the curriculum, as should the mechanics of handwriting—both printing and cursive. While we’re at it, let’s insist on pushing the kids to do basic arithmetic in their heads instead of with a calculator, to colour with crayons instead of a mouse, and depend less on technology than on their own manual abilities. You might think that cursive writing is expendable, and maybe it is—or would be, if the aforementioned technology was more reliable, but one sizeable electro-magnetic pulse and we’ll be back in the Stone Age. The handwritten word will resume its status near the top of the communications food chain and how will the millennials survive if they can’t communicate without their devices?

The viewers’ poll resulted heavily in favour of keeping cursive in schools (evidence, perhaps, of the median age in their audience demographic), and it also reminded me—because I need more reminding as I get older—of my pledge to draft blog posts by hand.

One of my delaying tactics is my reluctance to boot and park in front of the computer. It’s a pretty weak excuse when I can curl up on the couch with a notebook on my knee (the original laptop) and scribble in ink until my hand cramps. Transcribing to screen is easier than drafting onscreen anyway.

My handwriting is harder to read, though.

Dollars and Sense

And in other news, Sweden plans to be entirely cashless by 2030. More people than not are using plastic to pay for goods and services, and I admit, I count myself among them—for big ticket items that require some time to pay off in full. (Remember, I live from paycheque to paycheque.) And though my Starbucks card is on automatic renewal, I prefer to use cash for my café habit. Small amounts call for a fiver, or coin of some kind … and what about the office water club? I manage that account, and I can’t see me going wireless to collect dues, even though most of the members must make a special trip to the bank when I send out the bi-monthly bills.

Is it good to abolish cash in favour of electronic transactions? If money makes the world go around—and it does—I hesitate to entrust all of mine to technology. Aside from the familiar glitches that occur when Mercury is in retrograde or the network crashes due to high volume usage, what happens when the power goes out? I saw Goldeneye. I know what an electromagnetic pulse is. We depend so heavily on electricity, and now we’re practically helpless without our computers. A systems hiccup recently sent all the folks in my office to an early lunch because we couldn’t do our jobs with dead rigs.

I, Robot indeed.

Years ago, during a treatment  with my voodoo medicine man, he told me of a town in Japan where they have no technology at all, where transactions are handwritten on paper and people actually speak to each other instead of texting or emailing or whatever. His point was the irony of such a backward community existing within the borders of a technological superpower, but I stumped him.

I said, “That’s brilliant. If I wanted to rule the world, I’d make sure my people could function without the technology I sold to everyone else, then I’d do the EMP thing and kill all access to, heck, everything.”

Money has not always come in the form as we know it, but there has always been a tangible way to pay for goods and services. Debit and credit cards do not deal in tangibles, so when global systems crash for whatever reason, be it terrorism or act of God, the world had better have stashed some cash in the vault or we won’t be able to buy our morning coffee.

And that will make us all very crabby.

Dumber Than My Phone

What with navigating around F***book (I’m still a bit … okay, a lot boggled) and surviving fiscal year end, I’ve not done much writing of late. I miss it, but that’s okay – I have a week’s vacation coming soon and a project in mind. That, however, is another post.

As part of my ongoing plan to become a social media savvy celebrity author, I turned in the old flip phone and bought a Smartphone last weekend. It’s a basic model compared to the iPhones and Samsung Galaxies floating around out there, but I have a pre-paid mobile account and didn’t want to commit (there’s that fear again) to a contract with my upgrade. So this little fellow is a Motorola E (or something), powered by Google Android, which freaks me out because the androids on Star Trek thought they were better than humans and, if not for JT Kirk and Co., would have taken over the world … I digress. Mr. Moto is less a phone than it is a tiny computer. Once I figure out how to drive it, it will check my email, keep my appointments, snap photos, upload said photos to FB, send and receive text messages, reflect my scintillating personality by way of varied ringtones and desktop wallpaper, stash any apps I accidentally download, and probably cost me way more than the thirty dollars per month I’ve budgeted for the privilege of ownership.

Yes, I’m totally lost. Well, not totally. Ter found the user’s guide online – via the big computer rather than the “mobile device” – so between us we deduced how to answer an incoming call after the first experiment failed. The device started ringing … actually, it started to play a boogie tune that had me grooving until I saw our landline number on the screen. Whoa, call display! How cool is that? But once startled into action, I couldn’t figure out how to connect to the call! So off it went to voice mail, and off I went to consult the manual.

Handy things, those manuals. Too bad hard copies don’t come with the product; switching from the computer screen to the phone screen can start a migraine faster than cheezies with a chocolate chaser. I’ve yet to delve much deeper into it than skimming the basics, but at least I can answer a call or choose to ignore it and then retrieve the voice mail. I was able to record an outgoing message by remembering which buttons to push once I call my own number; it helps to have a similar VM system at work. And the camera … let’s be truthful here. I bought it for the camera, for spontaneous pics and fast uploads; again, part of Ru’s cunning Media Savvy Plan. I adore my little digital Canon, but I don’t carry it with me every day and I have missed golden weekday photo ops, like the streetlamp lying on the boulevard. It looked like the eye of the Martian spaceship in the Gene Barry version of War of the Worlds and I would have taken a picture if only. So I guess I’ve really bought a camera that has a phone rather than a phone that has a camera, so does it matter if I can’t get Mr. Moto to play Darth Vader’s Imperial March when my father calls?

In this intellectual game of chicken with my phone, you bet it does.

Fun with F***book

It’s finally happened. In my evolving quest for domination of literary cyberspace, I have joined Darth Ter to create an author page for myself on Facebook. It’s still under construction as I write this post, but on the weekend I sold my soul to start an account and the slippery slope is getting, well, slipperier.

Now I’m considering trading my flip phone for a Smartphone.

One should never say “never”. For years, I resisted the lure of social media because good and decent people are daily sucked into the black hole of technology. Bad enough that I spend more time twiddling my thumbs on the taxpayer’s dime when the network goes down at work, or that I have succumbed to the convenience of the Internet at home. It’s horrifying that texting while driving is now illegal as well as just plain stupid, and public service announcements are begging drivers to leave their phones alone. The need for real time uploads in place of genuine social interaction escaped me, nay, compelled me to rebel with all my might against a force that threatens the very fabric of our human connection. I sat at the coffee house the other day, watching a couple sharing a table—and nothing else. They may as well have been strangers, each was so engrossed in the tiny screen clutched in their respective hands. I dunno; maybe they were conversing with each other via FB, but isn’t it more gratifying to hear the other person’s voice and see their eyes while you’re talking?

The A side, however, makes it possible to spend real time with Nicole in Halifax, my older brother in PEI, and anyone else located outside of Victoria. Getting a virtual hug from Nic is as gratifying as a heart to heart hug from Ter, for obvious reasons. And, truth be told, if I want to follow my bliss and be well paid for writing, I must make myself known by whatever means available. Word of mouth is more powerful than a marketing budget, and it costs the author nothing.

My final rationalization for tripping onto the Dark Side is this: social media is merely a tool. It’s as potent or as harmless as the user wants to make it. Again, we only hear of the cyber-bullying, of malicious viruses and hacking of email accounts. Who’s to say this is the norm? I started this blog to send some good energy into cyberspace, and with luck, I can do the same via my FB page.

I may also become a filthy stinking rich celebrity writer from it, and that will be okay, too.

Sync or Swim

 

Technology bytes. I mean, bites. It wants to be my friend and I’m happy holding it at arm’s length. Like many relationships with promising starts, my relationship with technology has evolved into one of frustrating co-dependence. Sometimes it’s great. Sometimes I feel like I’m being held hostage by Bill Gates.

 

Okay, Bill is not the whole problem. Actually, maybe he is. Three computers dominate my life: my government-issued computer at work, the “big” computer at home, which is hooked into the Internet, and my writing computer, which is hooked into my imagination and kept in isolation from errant viruses and other cyber-borne pathogens. A USB flash drive transports the entire body of my literary work, projects both completed and in progress, between PCs so when some predictably inevitable misfortune occurs, my writing will not be lost forever.

 

My office desktop was new in 2007 and runs Windows Vista (don’t ask). My home computer was new in 2008 and runs Windows 7. My writing computer was bought used a hundred years ago and runs Windows XP. I am by necessity proficient with three different versions of MS Word, though I still lament the demise of Word Perfect as the world’s best word processing software. WP aside, everything was running fairly smoothly until I started an online blog via the Google server. I say “fairly” because the keyboard on the “big” computer has an annoying tendency to ignore certain keystrokes – the question mark, for instance, shows up as É onscreen, quotation marks slant the wrong way, and the @ symbol sometimes refuses to show up at all, which makes it darned difficult to sign into my Google account even though the “big” computer is the only one from which I can post anything. My work computer speaks to the Internet, but it’s rather like speaking Québecois in Paris – the language sounds the same to the uninformed ear, but the Parisian has no idea what the French-Canadian is trying to say. In short, when I log into my email account from the office, I get an error message that my browser is too old to handle the current version of whatever Google is using to power Blogger, so I can forget about setting up a post during a break in my workday ... at least until my employer upgrades to Windows 7.

 

And with the wonky keyboard on the “big” computer, blog content must be written on my XP rig and transferred by flash drive to whichever vehicle will get me to the site with a minimum of cyber-shenanigans. Three computers. Three, when I once swore never to own one.

 

One night I caught a blurb supporting the restoration of classic films to blu-ray so we can all enjoy the oldies as they were meant to be enjoyed. Uh-huh. I said to Ter, “Can we wait for what comes after blu-ray so we only have to upgrade once more?” We finally had to shift our video library from VHS to DVD, yet have so far held out against the blu-ray phenomenon – though I watch with morbid fascination the industry’s push to plant an 80-inch 3-D Smart-TV in the teeny-tiny living room of every crackerbox condo occupied by a victim of technological Attention Deficit Disorder.

 

Despite the rant, I recognize the benefits of technology. Truly, I do. I am grateful for (most of) it every day. Managing the monster is the tricky part, and the monster lies within the operator rather than the machinery. I could succumb to the hype that accompanies every shiny new toy that hits the market. I could spend twenty-five hours a day glued to the monitor and completely ignore the carbon-based unit who shares my living space. I could be more interested in the view halfway around the world instead of the view outside my window … my “real” window, not my digitally-enhanced one. I don’t know that it would enrich my life the way real books and real people and face-to-face conversations do, however. It’s good for keeping in touch with loved ones abroad. It’s been good for my arthritis, given that I used to write my stories in longhand with a Bic ballpoint. It’s even been good for business, though when the network crashes, the whole office shuts down until further notice because no one remembers how we did business without computers. But is it good for us as people? My answer is to get this piece ready for posting, then I’m going to hug my best friend.

 

Oh, heck. I’m going to hug her first.