By K. A. Laity
As the Electronic Frontier Foundation celebrates its 21st birthday, we have to accept the facts that our little baby the internet (AKA "the internets" or "a system of tubes") is all grown up and walking now –why, in fact it's a junior in college.
You'd think that all the stress and trouble of its feral childhood could be put behind us now. After all, your grandmother is on Facebook and your dad tweets for the local council and your mom has reached the alchemist level on Worlds of Warcraft by employing a fleet of poorly paid Chinese students who mine virtual gold in their spare time.
And yet we are no closer to normalcy. In a world where Justin Bieber is possible, anything can go wrong. We even have the experts throwing up their hands in despair or shamefacedly stubbing their toes in the dirt and muttered, "I just don’t know." The Tools for Change conference this week latched onto literate member of the Twitterati, Margaret Atwood, to talk about her experiences as an author in the digital age.
While Atwood has often denied any connection between her writing and science fiction (which made her miss out on a perfect opportunity to make a towel joke in her speech), TOC organizers clearly hoped she would divine some futuristic predictions from her own experiences in the digital market. While reiterating that a lot of the problems for writers haven't really changed (i.e. getting attention for any one book in a huge market), Atwood noted that "in the age of 'remote' and 'virtual' there's a craving for 'real' and 'authentic.'"
While that's always been the case, a lot of tech-resistant users find comfort in that assessment, but some may find a little too much comfort in that. As my own department reviews candidates for a position involving teaching both rhetoric and new media, I notice that there are still people who seem to think that they can wait out this internet thing, that it's a fad like Uggs or flares. They think they don't need to learn about Facebook, Twitter or asynchronous information delivery technologies because it's something "those kids" do and therefore not "serious."
This is how we live now. This is not the future. It's here now. You need it for your business, for your education and for your community. You can choose to do without it, but recognize it is a choice. People who have to do without it realise that they are being kept from an important tool for life in the modern world.
Fear of technology is nothing new. We always fear that there's an atavistic darkness lurking in the shiny heart of our glitzy computers, the terror that it will all overload, that everything is going to collapse and we'll be living in caves and drinking wine out of one another's skulls.
Yes, it is important to make mindful use of technology: puritanical denial is as ridiculous as being unable to unplug from it all. But if you just stand on the sidelines yelling, "Get a horse!" you are going to be left behind. You don't have to use everything that's available (no one does), but you can't keep hiding without cost.
K. A. Laity writes so much that she had to create some pseudonyms to keep her colleagues from thoughts of murder. A tenured medievalist at a small liberal arts college, she mostly tries to find ways to avoid meetings in order to write more . Find her on Facebook or follow her on Twitter to hear the latest news, reviews and excuses for why she hasn't done what you asked her to do last week.
Image via x-ray delta one's Flickr