2006-06-11T08:32:00.000-07:00

I am over my head in technology. I still write with bottled ink and a fountain pen and submit my tax returns by snail mail, and here I am starting a blog. In one era and out the other. But that's not a bad place to start. I'll be sixty in eight days. The irony is that in those years I think life has changed so much and so little. How we go about living, at least in the developed world, is vastly different. The examples are practically endless: internet banking, cell phones, distance learning, 100,000-mile tune ups, fast food and microwave ovens, interstate highways, hundreds of tv channels. Ironically, however, the substance of life hasn't changed much; relationships, work, family, love, triumphed, and disappointment are what mattered when I was a boy and what matters today as well. I think this raises an interesting issue: though I am far from a Luddite, does technology really matter? When I was a boy, there were elevator operators; today we operate elevators ourselves. Other than marginal differences--saving some money and allowing for the more productive employment of former elevator operators--does it matter that we now have self-operated elevators? Either way we get to a building's upper floors. Whether you balance a checking account each month using a pencil or using Microsoft Money, the account is reconciled. Again, the difference is marginal. The employment of many of my children (natural children, stepchildren and their "significant others") depends on technology. I am not ranting against technology, but merely asking whether the substance of life, the part of life that really matters, has changed as a result of technology; if it has changed, how it has changed; and if it hasn't changed much, whether technology is really the big deal it is universally thought to be?

The Ol' Buckeye