Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, October 8, 1995 TAG: 9510100014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Computers, I mean.
I say this knowing that my livelihood depends on signing on.
That the information superhighway is poised to change my life. That from now until that great electric company in the sky finally pulls the plug on all of us, the winners in this world will be those who love their Apples and their Windows - who are fulfilled by days, years, eons spent at their computers.
I don't care.
I hate these things.
Computers numb my brain. They hurt my back and neck.
And yet I use them - more and more and more.
Somehow computers have, in slowly centralizing all the varied activities of my workday - reading, writing, note-taking, researching, record-keeping, chatting - become the very symbol of the workplace, the repository of all remunerative labor. The Job.
Now, I hate to be a stick-in-the-mud. And I understand how futile it is to stand in the path of progress.
But I have this to say about this so-called Age of Information, whatever miracles it may accomplish for mankind:
A lifetime spent at a computer is a lousy life.
No, it's not the coal mines. It's not U.N. duty in Sarejevo. Though some of us at our computer screens might envy those in both professions their direct experience of life.
But neither is it stimulating, deep, or likely to lead us any closer to the meaning of the universe - something people occasionally sought in earnest back before the invention of the computer chip, when the virtual world became the one that mattered.
Nowadays, when life perplexes, we can download - or buy new software. Or chuck it all and go surfing on the 'Net.
My hatred of computers goes back to the first one I ever used inside a newsroom, in California in 1982. I was writing a story about the arrest of a drug-crazed bandit in a porno shop.
It had all the elements of a great news story - sex, violence, pathos - and I was telling it against a tight deadline with great fistfuls of purple prose. Unbeknownst to me, however, my computer was gobbling it all up right behind me, as the words rolled up and away off the screen.
And thus it was that when I got to the ending, the ending was all I had.
Bah! I said then.
Bah! I say now.
My newest computer is a snazzy Apple/MacIntosh, with its own name: Frank.
I hate Frank's silicon guts.
It isn't that I'm a technological moron, although I am. At least it isn't only that.
My dislike of FranK runs deep, deeper than I fully understand. To some extent It is visceral. Frank makes my guts twitch, the way they might if I saw somebody who had done me a horrible wrong, but to whom, for reasons legal, financial, ethical or other, I must be nice.
Yes. That is very close to the way I feel about Frank.
But I need him and I know it. The truth is, I could no more make a living now without this dumb box - nothing personal, Frankie - than I could swim to China.
This is a shame. Because computers are very bad for writing.
To anyone who disputes this, I am tempted to merely nod toward the plummeting circulation of daily newspapers in the decade-and-a-half since computers entered the newsroom and leave it at that. Say what you will about the myriad reasons for the nationwide decline in readership - changing life styles, alternative sources of information, and the rest - clearly not everyone finds our computer-produced prose impossible to resist.
In you ask me (no one has yet), computers - with their invitation to endless revision and editing - threaten to reduce everything written these days to a kind of glossy sludge.
Maybe never again will we see a master stylist like a Marcel Proust or a Henry James- neither of whose elegant sentences would have survived a minute in this age of written words that slosh around the screen like water. Editors never had it so easy.
On some level, I think, computers remind us that everything we do can disappear, these days quicker than ever. They remind us we mean little. Maybe this is the ultimate lesson to be taken from the Age of Information - the lesson we neglected to learn from the book of Ecclesiastes: Life is vanity, and a striving after wind.
The Economist magazine recently argued that - all the talk of fiber freeways notwithstanding - the Age of Information may be near its end.
The editors were not grieving.
"Information alone seldom produces great insights," the Economist noted. "Though there are almost as many people alive today as dead, most of the great thinkers, inventors, artists, philosophers and statesmen seem to be under the sod. ... Perhaps the rate of increase of information, and even of knowledge, has not been matched by the rate of increase of wisdom."
"Roll on the age of the sage," it concludes.
Count me in.
Kevin Kittredge, 39, is a features department staff writer. Now on leave from the newspaper, he's writing his second novel - on a manual typewriter. We're not joking.
by CNB