I don’t know if “technobivalence” is a word (well, it is
now) but that’s what I’d call my attitude toward all the (maybe) great devices
sprouting up and I was delighted to find, via Robert Crampton’s “Beta Male”
column in the Times magazine, that I am not alone. Are you one of us, too?
Crampton told of a party at which a friend showed off an
expensive new digital camera but admitted, “I haven’t used it yet. I’m
frightened of it.”
Crampton then confessed that when his kids aren’t around he’s
often unable to turn the TV on because he can’t work the four remote controls
that go with it.
He’s mastered his computer, mobile phone and tape recorder,
he says, “but I still hate and fear them.”
The fact that kids don’t bother with instruction manuals
when they get a new device but just start pushing buttons is obvious, but I
hadn’t thought about why it’s so much harder for us to do that. Crampton’s
explanation is right on target: “I belong to a generation that remembers when…if
you hit the wrong button the thing would break. Or at the very least cock up
your life.”
Yes, for instance by making a day’s worth of writing vanish.
I don’t know exactly when it happens, but I think there’s
some kind of turning point as you get older when you go from craving complexity
(“Wow, look at all the stuff this thing can do!”) to craving simplicity (“How
do you turn this thing on?”).
I call this technobivalence instead of technophobia because
although we fear these devices, we still crave them—or at least what we are
told they can do. Count yourself lucky if your household includes a
ten-year-old who can sooth your fears and show you how it’s done. Not that
you’ll remember it the next time.
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