A Very Difficult Life

Daily writing prompt

Your life without a computer: what does it look like?

I remember life without computers, because I grew up in the Sixties and Seventies, and the first DOS computers came out just before I went to college. DOS computers didn’t have the Internet or beautiful, intuitive interfaces, and composing a letter on one meant staring at a black screen with green letters. I used a typewriter to type my masters’ thesis because attractive typefaces were a blip in the future and things typed on a computer looked like they had been typed on a computer. And I was one of the more computer literate people I knew.

I would not want to go back there. I didn’t write a novel because it would have taken tens of hours to search for information on desert flora and fauna. I knew American deserts weren’t made of sand, and that’s about it. Years later, after the Internet, I wrote the novel with information I found on the Internet in mere minutes. I use the computer to communicate, to entertain, to research, to compose. My life without it would be difficult and tedious.

On the other hand, expectations of quality and speed were less back then. The one typeface of a computer was acceptable, and the time limitations of snail-mail were tolerable. A writer could get away with fewer books written further apart. My expectations, though, are shaped by the era of fast, aesthetically pleasing, versatile computers that expand the limits of what we produce.

Life without my computer would be tedious and bland. I don’t want to go back there.

In Love with Social Media

I’m having two conversations at once — one with a woman I have never met, the other with a man who is 13 hours away. These are the wonders of social media.

It’s because of social media’s ability to transcend place and time that I survive through the COVID era of distance and extreme caution. I am not an extrovert, but I love real conversations, the ones where you get beyond “how are you” and into things like culture, beliefs, and stories.

I was on social media in the 80’s, before there was social media as we know it. In college, I spent time on the PLATO system, which was mostly an educational system with functions that were used as social media as well as instructional communication. We had what we called “notesfiles” (which became Lotus Notes, and influenced later social media) which would be equivalent to Facebook’s Groups and subreddits. We had chat, known as term-talk, group chats — anything familiar to today’s social media user.

What PLATO didn’t have was a beautiful visual interface, instead having a line command interface much like pre-Windows computer; the ability to go to other sites to do research, and access to dating sites (although this is arguable; I had gone on two or three blind PLATO dates before Match.com existed. We didn’t worry about this, because were were a close-knit community, even though some of us were states away.)

Today, social media is so much more amazing than I expected it would be. Beautiful visual web pages, sites and apps that can facilitate sharing lives (Facebook), sharing pictures (Instagram), bond with video clips (TikTok), date (numerous, but I met my husband on Match.com), or become a base and despicable being (4chan).

And today I can open up the world with social media. I become just a little more cosmopolitan, vicariously.

A really quick note

4000 words to go! Phew!

Also: Google Earth and Wikipedia — next best thing to being there in the Owyhee desert. I could never have written this book in my twenties, because the research I’ve done on desert-hardy goats and sheep, natural predator control, biodiesel, underground housing …

You get the idea.

Also — love you all. Quiet time for me now.