I started this semester writing about my fear of killing penguins with too much printer paper. I have since had to halt that practice; printing everything in college is simply impractical penguins or not. So I have learned to be content highlighting in PDF and taking margin notes in notepad.
It’s not that I never liked computers. As a kid I was fascinated by the clunky desktop that sat in my father’s office, spent hours contentedly playing pinball, and considered Clippy a particularly helpful close personal friend.
My days of uninhibited computer exploring peaked at a time when desktop backgrounds were still blue skies and rolling green hills.
When I imagined a “coder” I thought of Wayne from Kim Possible—some geeky anti-social guy (though I’d always feel rather pleased albeit surprised whenever it was a woman) whose eyes never left the screen and whose body never left the comfort and safety of their bedroom. Nonetheless, it seemed to me that these hackers were capable of doing virtually anything (pun intended) with a few rapid keystrokes.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. (Clarke’s Three Laws)
Come middle school, I was compelled towards prioritizing other important and equally fascinating magic: managing crushes, learning how to do makeup, and buying and wearing the right clothes. By the time I came back to my past interest in computers, coding suddenly seemed impossibly complicated, uncomfortably alien, and ultimately inaccessible.
But I had found my way back to computers, not through the internet but through newer love—books. I have mentioned this book countless times already but Vikram Chandra’s Geek Sublime with its discussion of gender in early computing, personal and historical connections to the development of the tech industry in India, discussion of the beauty of language and code as language, and the aesthetic perfection of beauty as akin to divinity, I realized that I can still enjoy spend my time thinking about computers and technology even without the help and companionship of Clippy.
I choose to maintain an interest in computers not necessarily because it’s useful—in fact using computers often provokes anxiety and frustration for on a daily basis—but because I’ve come to understand computer technology as an extension of a long tradition of written and oral communication, a tradition that I feel far more comfortable accessing. The internet can be imagined as a high-speed printing press, block chain merely a hyper-secure ledger, Snapchat stories replaced the town crier, and computer programmers started playing at the philosopher’s question of God and Man with the creation of AI.
Each generation, buffered by its own hubris, believes that it is unique from the generation before and technology with its exponential trajectory does much to reinforce that paradigm. Yet even without romanticization, there is value in recognizing and learning from the technologies of the past even if we no longer consider them technologically relevant in this modern age. The printing press that created the book was just as revolutionary in its time as the explosion of computer technology and internet relevance that allows me to write this blog post.
While I can appreciate the significance of the culmination of this tradition in my lifetime as the digital age, this is all a very long-winded way for me to justify my past decision to refuse to learn more about how my iPhone works, or how to download Word, or why I should upgrade my iOs.
My friends roll their eyes whenever I tell them I don’t like to download excessive applications and laugh whenever I curse the computer because “the internet’s broken.”
The great challenge of the modern coder involves making the technical discussion of programming accessible to people who hold interest in other areas. The culture of computer programmers must refuse myopic and exclusionary practice. I can’t offer enough appreciation for my computer science tech friends who put up with my endless barrage of often stupid but challenging questions and answer with patience, rewording technical answers into comprehensible concepts, making their knowledge accessible so we can have exchange conceptual ideas freely. Before this class, I never thought I would know about much less have interest in technology like blockchain, and while I doubt I will ever feel compelled to get excited about software upgrades or Alexa or Bitcoin the way some of my friends do, I am glad I have at least returned to the conversation.
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