Confessing to Tech Love

I'm finished with college!!! Hooray hooray! So, I've moved back home and have just been chillin' for about a week now, and it's awesome.  This is the first time since I was 13 that I haven't had a job.  I'm taking a break (for about 2 weeks, maybe 3).  Working anywhere from 2-4 jobs, at the same time, during undergrad helped pay the bills, but was NOT fun.  Although I must say, lifeguarding at RIT was a pretty nice gig.  Anyway, doing nothing makes it difficult to find the motivation to do anything.  So, I'm on the hunt.  Updating my resume, picking up applications, and eventually filling them out is a throwback to last years internship search.  We'll see how it goes.  I'll let you know what happens.

In the process of updating the resume, I realized that I'm giving out my home phone number... I haven't had to give out the family digits since high school!  It's pretty strange, but fun nonetheless.  My friends are always asking me, "How do you expect to find a job if you don't have a cell phone!?"  I think my generation has forgotten about landlines.  It's not like I've fallen off the freakin' face of the planet, folks.  I can still be contacted.

There are my thoughts on employment, but that is not the only thing that has been going on in the past two weeks.

There are some confessions to be made (completely unrelated to the job search business).  As someone who has been writing down her rants against modern technology, I have to admit that I've recently succumbed to the temptation of one of my greatest adversaries... the Kindle.

I know.  I've already been yelled at and criticized by many of my closest friends.  They know how I feel about books, my passion for paper, and my fanaticism about the way ink is laid on a page.  I have been an advocate for the tangibility of a printed book, and still am.  There is nothing that can replace the feeling of a smooth cover, or the pages between your fingers as you turn into the next chapter of a journey, otherworldly.  These are things that I still believe in, but I like my new Kindle too.

My parents gave it to me for graduation, which is what I often use as an excuse when my friends look at me like I'm nuts.  This was a week ago, and I've finished Alice in Wonderland and am currently trying to figure out where I left off in the library version of Anna Karenina.

When all is said and done, there are two things that come into play in a book (the printed kind).  There's the book, the physical manifestation of a process from tree to pages.  Books are art.  Books are beautiful.  Books are valuable.  Remember, right now I am talking about the book, meaning the paper, the binding, the design, the materials, ect.

The second thing that contributes to a book is the written word.  Books have always been so closely associated with their content because, until now, there has been no other way to deliver that content to its intended audience.  The words within the book, and the book itself are actually two different things! They are two different forms of artistic expression.  Writing is a skill, and so is bookmaking.

These two different art forms complement each other very well, which is why printed books and magazines will never go out of circulation entirely.  Combined with the fact that electronics are so unpredictable (many times unreliable) and ever changing, I'd say there is still more than one solid argument against e-books and things of similar nature.

However, I don't believe that the physical form of a book defines the quality of its content.  As a reader, I would choose the printed word over electronic any day.  However, as a writer, I don't really care how my work gets to readers (as long as it's being read).  I think that many writers, past and present, would feel the same.  A poem, a story, or a commentary is still made of the same words whether printed or electronic.  It is most likely more aesthetically pleasing in printed form, but I believe that the goal of most writers is to have their work read regardless of aesthetics or mode of delivery.

I still buy books.  Friends of the Library in Ithaca, New York recently had a books sale where every book was ten cents (they often have really awesome book sales, so check out the link if you're interested).  I broke the bank with $1.60, and walked away with 16 new additions to my book shelf.

Children's Literature has also been one of my recent addictions, and I have to say that print plays a more important role in this arena.  Children NEED printed books.  It's a developmental thing.  They learn so much more by interacting with pages, and discovering how to care for things (books) that are easily damaged.  Kids just grow by having an actual book in front of them.

I also buy hard copies of the books that I enjoy reading on the Kindle.  If it's a really great book, I want to make sure I have it, printed, for future re-reading and sharing.  I generally also tend to be a sucker for cover art (this is one way the Kindle helps me save money; I don't buy e-books that I will never read for the cover art), so works that I love on the Kindle are works that I often want to be supplemented by the art of a book.

Anyway, I'm having fun reading, and I hope you are too.  I know this post really had nothing to do with cell phones, but not everything in life does, and that's just the way I like it.

Smart Kids Play With Stupid Toys

So, there are only two days standing between me and a diploma from Rochester Institute of Technology.  I will graduate with a Bachelor's of Science degree in Biomedical Photographic Communication.  Sounds sophisticated, I know... Of course it does, Refined is my middle name (*ahem* sarcasm).

Anyway, all of this pressure about growing up has got me thinking about when I was a young, little thing.  I've realized how much has changed since then in terms of technology.  My upbringing was pretty old school.  We began learning cursive in first grade, and were subsequently required to perfect the skill until about eight grade.  By that time the graphite and ink had seeped via passive diffusion into our adolescent veins.

In high school, the skill was irrelevant.  I should mention that I went to a public high school (they had these machines called computers), and the cursive dictators only reigned supreme at the private school I had attended previously.  Handwriting transitioned from a skill to an art, one that I am grateful to have now that I can appreciate artistic things, but as far as functionality was concerned handwriting didn't make the cut.

I had to learn to type.  I taught myself... Kinda.  My keyboarding skills are still well below the average "words per minute" of my peers.  Interestingly enough, I recently learned from a co-worker that her daughter's public school began teaching typing in kindergarten.  She and her husband had to teach their daughter how to write her name in cursive so that she could make a signature later in life.

What effects do these shifts in technology have on children growing up in the "modern" world?  Well, let me tell you a story from when I was about 7 years old:



My bestest friends in the whole wide world when I was 7 were my stuffed aminals (I am aware of the spelling, be creative people).  I loved my stuffed aminals more than any other toy that was given to me.  I would cut the tags off as close as possible to the stitches because that would allow the stuffed aminals to become real.  Real aminals didn't have tags, so why would my aminals want them?  That was how I brought them to life.

At night my stuffed buddies would gather around the outer edges of my bed.  They would guard my bed from any bad things that tried to get me while I slept.  Spiders, ghosties, vampires, and the boogie man had no chance.

During the day, we would have tea party picnics.  My friends would sit on my favorite blanky, and mommy would pour us little cups of tea (which was really just water with far too much sugar in it).  We would tell each other stories, and read each other books (back then all books were printed on paper, and I taught my aminals to turn these things called pages).  The best of the aminals would get to go outside with me.  We would walk to the park, or explore the woods behind my house.  Sometimes mommy would even bring us to the beach!

One day, I had a human friend over to play.  I loved my human friends too.  We ran around outside for a while.  We blew bubbles in the back yard, and chalked the sidewalk with bright colors.  After a while, we went inside to play.

I brought out my stuffed aminals, thinking it would be very nice of me to share, and handed one of them to my human friend.  It was a life-sized cat with orange fur and tiger stripes (one of my favorites).  She looked at me, confused, and said, "What does it do?"

I replied, "What do you mean?"

"Well, does it make cat sounds, or talk, or something?"

"No..."  I was completely bewildered.

"Why do you have it if it doesn't do anything?"

"What do you mean 'if it doesn't do anything,'" I asked.

"I meaaannnnn... If it doesn't meow, or purr, or do cat things when you squeeze it then it's stupid!  It's stupid to play with toys that don't do anything."

"He isn't stupid," I yelled, "He's my cat and I love him!"

Let's just say that the rest of that play date didn't go too well.  I ran crying to mommy pretty quickly, and don't remember her saying much (although I did catch the word "crazy" being mumbled under her breath).  I just didn't understand why other kids couldn't see that my stuffed aminals were alive.



The moral of the story is that technology makes kids stupid.  Well, that's more or less what I'm trying to say, but maybe I should re-phrase it.  Children develop more imagination when more is left to the imagination.  If an audio-recorded cat sound is implanted into a stuffed cat, then "meow" is all that the cat will ever say.  The sound is given to the child, and therefor it is not created by them.  My cats, dogs, and teddy bears all had in depth conversations with me because I created those conversations.  I was not given a "purrrr", and expected to be content with that.  I was able to create.

Toys these days are like smartphones compared to what I used to play with.  They beep, and talk, and dance and are all pre-programmed to keep your child entertained with the same five phrases for hours and hours and hours.  Parents, don't expect your kids to learn much more than those five phrases.  Smart kids play with stupid toys.

This reflection on childhood actually applies in my life today.  Thank God I learned how to write because when I experience serious writers block an LED computer screen just won't snap me out of it.  I have to pick up a pen.  I have to connect, physically, with my words.

I think this is essential in so many creative processes.  There is something to be said for digital photography (I should know; I just spent four years of my life studying it), but there is nothing like walking into a darkroom and developing your own film.  This is something that many of the new photography students never get to experience, and what a horrible absence it creates.  For an artist to be tangibly connected to a process allows for a tangible connection to the product, a pride in one's work.

I pray that there will never be a day when we rely 100% on technology, on what is already given, or on things that so easily fail.