One of the things I find pretty cool about being on a faculty is access to tech. Right now I’m evaluating a Sony e-reader, touchscreen edition Sony sent me, and I just installed Word 2010, thanks to IU Southeast making it available already. The dept. even bought me some nifty mind mapping software and a Hebrew word processor I requested.
But tech for a writer is dangerous – it really needs to be looked at deeply and suspiciously. My years as an editor for desktop computing at techrepublic.com gave me a healthy suspicion riding on the shoulders of geekcitement over new possibilities and new toys.
I think tech makes writing easier when it works. But it also makes it slower sometimes and harder when it doesn’t – especially if you’re easily distracted by the fear of the blank page. I can get out a pencil and paper and just get to work. Or I can wait for the computer to boot up, check e-mail and Facebook, write a blog, and update Windows before getting started. I feel like I’m doing something, but I’m doing nothing for my creative future.
What’s more likely to crash and burn: paper, or all your data at once, when a hard drive crashes, or a flash drive goes down?
Is it safer and more secure to store your data in a file drawer or online at Google? I was shocked recently when Google calendar went down for a day and I couldn’t access my appointments (I now write them down on paper, perhaps doing TWICE the work.) It was a reminder that the Internet is a data highway, and just like any highway there can be traffic jams, accidents, construction, and detours (and maybe cops who pull you over)…
Tech makes editing and formatting so easy. Yet we’re just one power surge or lightning strike or network failure away from losing ever larger collections of our creative works, or being prevented from accessing them, so the only good solution is to always print and file paper copies, which is one thing tech is supposed to save us from.
Yet I like tech. I like it a lot during the narrow, serene windows of time when it works, even if I have to sync my Google calendar with Outlook so I can sync it to my Blackberry, and then still write each appointment on paper. Even if the narrow window gets broken suddenly, like when I decide to print new drafts for safekeeping and the fucking printer jams or the toner runs out, or like two days ago when I opened my chapbook to revise it, and suddenly Word couldn’t read the file, saved it to an unusable tmp format with warning messages for miles, and caused a two-day search for a solution, and the scary upgrade to Word 2010 that started this blog entry.