“Technology: No Place for Wimps!” –Scott Adams (1957 – ) creator of Dilbert
I have always been a Luddite. I still am, despite the fact that I can spend hours on the computer every day. I check and recheck the hundreds of e-mails I receive, keep tabs on my book sales, market using social media, cruise Facebook (way too much), play computer games, maintain my website and blog, and copyedit online.
However, I still call my myself a Luddite. I use no technology in my classroom (sorry, administrators). This is primarily because my students don’t have laptops yet, and also because I don’t know what cables to use to hook up my computer to my projector. With me, much of it is a connection problem. Wires baffle me.
Anyway, Luddite that I may be, my world was rocked (in a bad way) when my website went down this week. I never would have known except I kept getting messages on social media that when readers pressed the link to my blog post all they got was a blank page. I finally tried it myself, and there it was! Nothing! What was wrong and who would fix it? I immediately e-mailed my website designer and maintainer, the wonderful Gil Namur. He worked on the site for hours and couldn’t figure it out. He suspected that my site had been hacked and recommended that I call my host—Hostgator. They both tossed around terms like scripts, PHPs, malware, plugins (I do know what the last two are!). After some frustrating time on hold with Hostgator (whom I highly recommend) and e-mails back and forth to Gil (whom I also highly recommend), the website was up, apparently the victim of hacking. The malware was removed, and now I can write this blog post for you all to see!
So, I became inspired by technology and how it can ruin our lives if it goes bad. Here is my quote about technology:
“When it works it is great; when it doesn’t, it is 10,000 times worse than never having had it at all!”
And here are some quotes about technology by people far more famous than I!
“Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage, and those who manage what they do not understand.”
–Putt’s Law
‘Technology is a way of organizing the universe so that man doesn’t have to experience it.”
–Max Frisch
“The only way to discover the limits of the possible is to go beyond them into the impossible.”
–Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – )
“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
–Arthur C. Clarke (1917 – )
“For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.”
–Alice Kahn
“Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.”
–Buckminster Fuller (1895 – 1983)
“We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.”
–Carl Sagan (1934 – 1996)
“I’ve always wanted to own and control the primary technology in everything we do.”
–Steve Jobs (1955 – 2011)
“I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians that misrepresented life by leaving out sex.”
–Kurt Vonnegut (1922 – 2007)
“The real problem is not whether machines think but whether men do.”
–B. F. Skinner
“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”
–Albert Einstein
“Technology is just a tool. In terms of getting the kids working together and motivating them, the teacher is the most important.”
–Bill Gates
“Technology is supposed to make our lives easier, allowing us to do things more quickly and efficiently. But too often it seems to make things harder, leaving us with fifty-button remote controls, digital cameras with hundreds of mysterious features and book-length manuals, and cars with dashboard systems worthy of the space shuttle.”
–James Surowiecki
“We’re still in the first minutes of the first day of the Internet revolution.”
–Scott Cook
“I force people to have coffee with me, just because I don’t trust that a friendship can be maintained without any other senses besides a computer or cellphone screen.”
–John Cusack
“The Internet is the most important single development in the history of human communication since the invention of call waiting.”
–Dave Barry
“Broadband access is the great equalizer, leveling the playing field so that every willing and able person, no matter their station in life, has access to the information and tools necessary to achieve the American Dream.”
–Michael K. Powell
“Adding sound to movies would be like putting lipstick on the Venus de Milo.”(That’ s an oldie!)
–Mary Pickford
“Gates is the ultimate programming machine. He believes everything can be defined, examined, reduced to essentials, and rearranged into a logical sequence that will achieve a particular goal.”
–Stewart Alsop
“Did you ever spell a word so bad that your spell check has absolutely no clue what you’re trying to spell? What do you end up getting, you end up getting, like, a question mark. You got a million dollars of technology just looking back at you like, ‘You got me, buddy. Which is pretty amazing because I have all the words.'”
–Bill Burr
“The art challenges the technology, and the technology inspires the art.”
–John Lasseter
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you’re not part of the steamroller, you’re part of the road.”
–Stewart Brand
“I’m sorry, it’s true. Having children really changes your view on these things. We’re born, we live for a brief instant, and we die. It’s been happening for a long time. Technology is not changing it much – if at all.”
–Steve Jobs
“What I did in my youth is hundreds of times easier today. Technology breeds crime.”
–Frank Abagnale
“I won’t compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way.”
–Lewis Thomas
Till next week, if your computer is working, give it a hug!
What happened to the old grade books, or even the letters or documents that were handwritten? A topic for another day!
Wow! Thanks for the comment. I forgot all about this blog post! Well, as far as the documents that were handwritten, schools are still giving a short nod to teaching ursive so that students can read original documents — and I guess sign their names!
Just because you CAN do something with technology, does not mean that you SHOULD do that something. For example, I just don’t understand the marketing emphasis that says it is absolutely important that my home appliances, like a clothes washer or toaster, must be connected to the internet of things. Why? So some bored teenager hacker continents away can burn my toast as a joke? Frankly after working in the IT field for 4 decades I have decided it is time to simplify and not complicate my life further with all the gadgets seeking to consume every waking minute of what little life I have left.
Exactly, Rick!
As world-widening as technology is, and a boon especially for creativity, nothing, and I mean, nothing, can and should replace the ink-to-paper mode of communication, that intimate effort that can add pathos and specialness to expressing genuine emotion through the dogged physical and psychological charm of giving a shit about someone else.
I am with you, Ann!
This is a wonderful piece. I especially like that collection of quotations: witty, even-handed, and often true.
I’m not, however, persuaded by your piece that you are a Luddite. According to dictionary.com, a Luddite is either someone who destroys industrial machinery (or wants to), or who opposes industrial change or innovation. Someone who identifies the problems of technology is not automatically a Luddite. In fact, being aware of the problems can serve to improve and advance technology, not impede it.
Murray
P.S. Given that you’re a lover of words, I wonder if you’ve had the following experience: Because Dictionary.com is online and hence always close at hand, I find myself looking up words more frequently than I did in the old paper dictionary days. I look up meanings and etymologies. I also do use the electronic dictionary on my Kindle, and again I find that technology helps deepen my understanding and appreciation of the written word.
Thank you! I guess I use Luddite fairly loosely — but I certainly feel like one at my teaching job, still writing everything on the whiteboard….It is easier to look words up online….but once again, at school, we use paper dictionaries in my room!
“Wires baffle me.”
Seems to me you would be a good person to design elementary school instruction in science and electricity. Simply figure out how you would make these things easy for you, and then you’ll have it
Good idea – except the elementary school students could probably teach me a thing or two about technology!
If not saved frequently, all the information input is gone in a second. Working on grades last week, focused on the task at hand, I forgot to save each and every entry with a simple key stroke [Ctrl S] and so when the power went off, the grades and comments vanished into the ethernet. What happened to the old grade books, or even the letters or documents that were handwritten? A topic for another day!
Been there, done that….or written a long e-mail and have it go POOF!