Technophobia 9

Downside to aging: people sometimes imagine I am a little old lady who has just got her first tablet. I've been using social media since before you were born, dear!

I’ve heard the urban legends but it finally happened; my grandmother printed and mailed me a Facebook post. (@_carolinebones)

My son once bought me a Kindle; I didn't even know how to turn it on! (via FB)


It’s 2021 and...

We’ve been Zooming for over a year, but people are still using a tablet, and laying it down on a table so that all we can see of them is their double chins.

Someone just thanked me for telling her she could open two Word docs and position them side-by-side. (Some people don’t know you can resize them, either.)

People are complaining that they lose their place on Twitter because it keeps “refreshing”. Go to the top, click on the star, and switch to “Latest Tweets”. Keep your eye on it, because Twitter keeps switching you back “Home”.


In the mid-80s I realised I could earn £2,000 a year more “operating a word processor” instead of pounding a typewriter at a book publisher, as nice young girls were expected to do. I didn’t care where I worked or for whom, but I did a week's course, almost immediately landed a word-processing job at the Financial Times, and never looked back.

It was sheer snobbery – people thought computers were beneath them, and the people who operated them were lower down the food chain. I was the only posh bird doing that job – and was probably hired for that reason. Well, never mind.

In the 80s, I read the technology pages in the Guardian, looking for the next thing and working out how it was going to affect our working lives. Also I was fascinated – technology was going to make everything easier and simpler. People complained about a new terminology of "bits and bytes". I bought a dictionary of computing. But most office workers back then took no notice of technology at all. Computers or electronic typewriters were introduced at their place of work, they had some brief training, they whinged about it, and then they used the technology to do only what they’d been shown. The revolution happened, the devices converged, the internet and wifi and satellites put us all in touch with each other. But now there’s a weird backlash, and technology is talked of as if it was somehow contaminating.

Facebook and Twitter are part of our lives, as is buying and looking up stuff online, but the old Puritan ethic means we have to claim we “take breaks” from it all. (Remember those 15-minute, hourly screen breaks that were going to preserve our health?)

“I only use FB over my wife’s shoulder.”

“I don’t normally do Twitter, but...” before reposting something. (Also “Perhaps I should get an Instagram”, as if they were going to buy a hoover.)

"I try and take FB breaks so I can retain a sense of normality." (Via FB.)

People are still recommending taking a “two-day break” from Twitter. Someone on Facebook still calling it “Twatter”.

Ask yourself:
Could this meeting be a Zoom?
Could this Zoom be a phone call?
Could this phone call be an email?
Could this email be a text?
Could this text be unsent?
Could we in silence retreat to the forest?
Could we, by game trails and forgotten paths, vanish into the trees?
(But would it buy the baby a new bonnet? And what are you going to do when you get there?)

I have no desire to write in haiku sentences, really! (CM on FB)

My partner has no social media accounts, except for an Insta where she posts one single photo a year. (@trillingual)


More here, and links to the rest.