Hey! There comes a day when you HAVE to eat the spinach, Mush Muffin. It’s not all fish sticks and cinnamon buns you know!
Justification ends, essay begins … right …now:
It has been rattling around in my brain for months now….
(Oh I’m sure it’s pretty RIPE by now then…..)
Shut up.
(Sigh)
As I was SAYING, I have been thinking, with all of our marvelous technological creations, we have widened our world in many ways, and I have to say that having the chance to share ideas with this wider world is exciting and stimulating. I’m happy about it.
But….
(Here it comes….)
When I was manipulating an image the other day in Adobe Photoshop… I suddenly realized that so much of what we do with the computer is not creative, but selective. We choose. We manipulate. We customize. We order to our liking. We alter. We combine. We distort. But we are not creating. This illusion of “power” is very strong, I grant you. And it is kept alive by the sheer number of choices available. If you can choose between 2000 images, you can feel like what you end up with is “yours”. When in fact, you have only chosen one of the variables.
Before I go further, I must admit and joyfully, that the written content of our diaries here IS original to us, unique and valuable. But the packaging, and the tools of technology can be so …. seductively deceptive.
It gives us a false sense of control that in fact we do not possess.
For instance, I just set up some folders in my Windows Media Player to be able to listen to the music on my hard drive in “exactly” the order I want, and separated them into styles. But it’s not the same my friend as getting out a guitar or sitting down at the piano and composing an original song of our own. In that activity, we are involved, engaged, and creating something completely new and our own. And I think, it effects our brain and psyche in a completely different way, making us more calm, more content, more united mentally, spiritually, and psychologically.
But the ersatz creativity that we so often are exposed to creates a different set of reactions. I admit to you that they are subtle, but they are pernicious. Having a huge number of choices ultimately makes us feel discontented. (This goes for all things, not just technology) Being able to manipulate our environment ad infinitum creates in us a short attention span, a propensity to impatience and quick irritation at obstacles. Including an intolerance of things that take a long time to accomplish. And this set of attitudes begins to effect the larger society.
How many television pundits have you heard say that we need to “move on” from September 11th? What? I am supposed to lay aside the injustice of that horrific day and the awful loss of life, and move on? Move on to what?
What is so important that I need to drop this and move on to something else? What, rearranging my audio files? Choosing a new car? Making sure my mutual funds are configured precisely to get the maximum return? If we do not value human life highly enough, all the configuration choices in the world will not help you when the madmen knock down the door.
Oh, I know I sound a little mad.. . Okay, mad as a hatter. But this stuff worries me. It also gets in my way when trying to create right here at home. I may have decided upon a name for my planet in the novel, but I have come smack up against a tangle of computer files in the re-write and after a very frustrating two days, I finally figured out what was holding me up. The computer itself.
It is great for getting things done fast. And it keeps track of lots of things.
But right now, it is hindering my progress. I decided I need to take my hard copies and write out some chapters long hand so I can easily look at all the places I am drawing from. It is one thing to spread 10 sheets of paper out on a table and make notes, and another altogether to try to do that on the computer. You better be VERY careful how many documents you have open at once, as I learned recently the hard way! And you can only look at one at a time. It is VERY difficult to see the big picture on a computer. And that is what my problem was. I am going to work from hard copies for a few weeks, and when I get it squared away, THEN I will use this computer tool when I need it. Not to mention giving me break from this screen, which is ravaging my poor middle aged eyes.
So I am back to my conflicted uncomfortable chair.
I hold a chair don’t you know, in the College of Curmudgeons. The chair that has a Technology logo on it…. It is a figure with a double edged sword. Use the one side, all well and good. But be wary the second.
(Are you done?)
For now.
(Good, I have to go re-configure my desktop)
Sigh. Have a nice day.