technology - Debbie Young's Writing Life

The Electronic Grapevine

Posted on April 11, 2013July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

Image of explosion on ship in Falklands War — Smoke signals from the Falklands War

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how quickly the digital age has revolutionised the speed of news transmission. As a radio documentary recently reminded me, only 30 years ago news stories and photos from the frontline of the Falklands War often took two weeks to reach the news headlines.

As I’m the first to complain about the lethargy of our local internet service, for the sake of fairness, I would like to confess a change of heart. Recently, via my computer tucked away in darkest Hawkesbury Upton, I was able to pick up news of the pope’s appointment even while the white smoke was still wafting out of a Vatican chimney. (How slow must the Pope’s wifi be if lighting a fire is the quicker than sending an email? )

By chance, I had my Twitter account open when up popped “New pope” on the “trends” list – a handy menu tab that flags up the most talked-about subjects of the moment. These are often, but not always, breaking news stories.

Always eager to experience history in the making, I immediately clicked to the page that showed the latest “new pope” messages. At that second, there flashed up on the screen, a message from the Vatican’s very own Twitter account, @Pontifex: “Habeamus Papem Franciscum” – Latin for “We have Pope Francis”.

A Pope tweeting in Latin? Now there’s an enchanting meeting of ancient and modern. I wonder whether he could tell me the Latin word for “internet”?

(This post was originally written for the April 2013 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News)

If you liked this post, you might enjoy my other recent article inspired by the Pope: Nominal Determinism, Pope Francis and Other Keywords I Have Loved

Writing

The Lost Art of Letter-Writing

Posted on February 22, 2012July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

I arrive home to find my husband agitated, clutching an empty envelope.

“I need you to print a letter for me, urgently.”

I remind him I’m due at the hairdresser’s in ten minutes.

“But I have to get it in the post today. It’s a legal document. It must be postmarked with today’s date.”

His printer, it emerges, has packed up again. But producing his letter on my machine will not be as simple as he assumes, because I’ve just acquired a new computer. First I must install the printer software. Which means finding the disk.

The edge is taken off his urgency by the revelation that he doesn’t have a stamp to put on the envelope.

The hairdresser calls. I have my priorities.

“I’ll do it when I come back,” I promise.

On my return, to my surprise I find the software disk in the first place I look for it and slip it into the disk drive, but even so, the installation is not the work of moments. A series of tedious prompts pop up on the screen as the disk drive chugs away. After a few false starts and the emission of copious blank pages (I realise afterwards that I’ve been pressing “photocopy” instead of “print document” and have inadvertently copied lots of nothing), the computer tells me to reboot.

By now I’m beginning to glaze over. The motto of a former colleague, the late, laconic Bristolian IT manager John Hamilton, is echoing in my brain: “Lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part”. (I don’t suppose there are many IT guys these days who can get away with calling all their female clients “Flower”.)

I’m gazing unseeingly at the screen when the printer finally spits out two copies of Gordon’s letter, accompanied by much whirring and clunking. “This document contains 69 words,” the monitor informs me, a propos of nothing. All that fuss and effort for just 69 words! It hardly seems worth the bother.

I scoop up the two sheets of paper and ferry them downstairs to my husband who is busy on the sofa watching telly with his feet up.

“You know,” I say slowly, “there is another way your could have dealt with this. You could have written the letter out by hand.”

There is a beat.

“I didn’t think of that,” he confesses.

Note to self for future reference: for all our technological advances, in this digital age, the pen is still mightier than the computer. Long live the pen.

Family, Reading

Write On

Posted on September 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

What new-fangled technology most irked the ancient Greek philosopher Plato? Apparently it was the written word. He feared that the spread of literacy would make people less reliant on their memory, causing their brains to atrophy.

Now that just about all of us can read and write, any discussion of memory is more likely to relate to computers rather than brains. IT is certainly making us less reliant than our forefathers on the information we carry in our heads.

I’m old enough to remember the advent of the pocket calculator. In 1973, my father bought, at vast expense, the revolutionary Sinclair Cambridge. It was a very basic calculator by modern standards, but how we marvelled at it.

: Image via Wikipedia

We preferred not to believe that it would dull our powers of mental arithmetic, but now that such things are commonplace, there must be few modern accountants capable of what my grandfather, working in the 1960s, could do: add a whole page of figures in his head.

To my mind, dimming the ability to memorise facts and add figures is not the main problem caused by our dependence on computers. What worries me most is that future generations will lose out on archive material. Paper may biodegrade in time, but it outlasts most computer chips and disks and is a lot more solid than ether. Whose computer can still access the 5¼” floppy disks that were industry standard just 30 years ago? Even the fact that we measured them in inches must seem laughably old-fashioned to the latest entrants to the workplace. We set aside paper and pen at our peril.

So in your understandable enthusiasm to fill your recycling box every other Tuesday for our commendable village kerbside collection, think twice about throwing away every bit of paper. At least hang on the 125^th Hawkesbury Show Schedule for posterity; guard safely this issue of the parish mag, especially if it mentions you by name. In time, your grandchildren will thank you for it.

(Oh no, Debbie Young’s blog can only be accessed online!)

This post was originally published in the September 2010 issue of the Hawkesbury Parish News.

Personal life, Travel

Our Global Village

Posted on August 1, 2010July 18, 2016 by Debbie Young

You’d think that the novelty of the internet would have worn off by now. But every so often, tapping away at my laptop, I’m bowled over at this power we have to be in touch with the rest of the world.

A glance up from my desk reminds me that I’m still in Hawkesbury Upton. Familiar horses trot past my window; neighbours flit up France Lane to the shop. Exotic, it ain’t.

star trek — Image by Combined Media via Flickr

But, look back at my screen, and I can be anywhere in the world. It’s like having my own personal teleporter: beam me up, Scottie, I think I’ll take a trip to Seattle.

A message has pinged in to my email box from an old school friend who lives there. As our village heads towards bedtime, she’s just settling down for her lunch. By the power of Facebook, we bounce one-liners off each other as easily as if we were in the same room. We’re as closely in touch as when we were children, talking to each other in the garden through tin cans linked together with string. Except, on the internet, the message comes through more clearly.

Clicking on my website traffic report, I find visitors from three different continents. From Korea to Kansas, from Dubai to Dubrovnik, people have been checking me out, even though I don’t know a soul in Seoul.

The news I pick up through this route is not the stuff that national headlines are made of. Food, drink, weather, hatches and matches are the most frequent topics of the posts by my Facebook friends.

But the sense of a unified, peaceable community, reaching way beyond our own Hawkesbury Upton, is overwhelming and enormously heartening.

There’s still nowhere else I’d rather live, of course. But it still feels good to extend the village boundaries across the ether now and again.

(This post was originally published in the August edition of the Hawkesbury Parish News.)