Technology Narrative. Word. (literally)

Technology has always been a big part of my life. My earliest memory with technology and writing was probably when I was about 10 years old. We had an old no-name computer in my house, and when I say old computer, I basically mean an ancient computer that was little more than a simple word processor. It ran off floppy disks and made the most obnoxious whirring sound for as long as the power was on. We had three games for it. One was Robocop for my dad, and the other two were Playskool Math and Reader Rabbit for me and my brother. The Reader Rabbit game is the first experience I had with technology and writing. It was all about teaching spelling and sentence structure, so I’ve been using computers to write for almost as long as they’ve been around, and certainly before they were commonplace in peoples’ homes.

The next computer we got was the Apple Macintosh, which had way more abilities and memory than our first computer. In my early teens I would spend hours writing extremely cliché angst poetry and bizarre short stories about former presidents getting in fistfights with other dead celebrities, and saved them to the hard drive, only to be found and deleted promptly by myself a year or two later when I realized how horrible they truly were.

Right after this time was when the internet boom began, and AOL lead the way with its technology that allowed people to email and instant message each other. It was such a novelty at the time, that after my friends and I had hung out all day and had to be inside for curfew, we’d spend ten minutes signing online through our 14k modems to sit in these new things called “chat rooms” and talk about the exact same stuff we had been discussing all day, only this time in a fascinating (and sometimes nauseating) array of fonts, colors, and sizes to emphasize our points in a way simply speaking never could. It was also about this time that internet lingo was invented. At first it was simple abbreviations to save time while chatting, as at the time we despised our keyboarding/typing classes and swore a solemn oath to ourselves that we would never stray from the two finger “hunt and peck” typing method. It started off slow, a simple “lol” to stand for “laugh out loud,” the self explanatory “f u,” or the most frequently used “pos” that alerted other cyber junkies that there was a “parent over shoulder” so don’t say anything inappropriate, and has evolved into it’s own dialect that only the 1337 (or elite “L e-e-t”) can decipher.

Instant messages and emails allowed anyone, anywhere to be able to communicate instantly with people from around the globe, turning our planet from an enormous sphere that used to take months to traverse, into something you could access in a matter of seconds. Talking to other people isn’t the only advance technology made in writing. About 7 years ago, internet blogs started to appear. Blogs are essentially online journals that people can post their innermost secrets in, or simply to broadcast their daily exploits to anyone in the world who is interested and has a few minutes of spare time. I have had a livejournal for almost eight years now, and at first I loved it. I was never able to keep a handwritten journal, and writing with a pen seemed to take too long for my hand to be able to keep up with the thoughts in my head and get everything down, not to mention the money spent on buying a journal, and the handcramps excessive writing would cause. Online blogs offered me the opportunity to type my thoughts as fast as I could think them in a secure space that couldn’t be found by a sibling rifling through my room, and I could even do it at the same time as I messaged my friends, so I didn’t have to designate a specific amount of time each day as “writing in my journal” time. However, as blogs became more popular, and LiveJournal in particular, more of my friends signed up for them and befriended me and were able to read my posts. On one hand, this became another good way to keep in contact with everyone, especially if they didn’t have internet in their homes and could only get on for short periods of time at internet cafes or the library. On the other hand though, because sometimes my posts contained thoughts or feelings or rants about the very people who were reading my journal, and for fear of offending them or ending friendships, I was forced to censor myself in my own journal, which no one should EVER have to do, and now I only use my LJ to post pictures or poetry I’ve written that I specifically want my friends to see.

As many inherent problems as technical writing tools presents, it offers just as many, if not more benefits. I write poetry, short stories, and screenplays. The quality of these is questionable, but my computer allows me to keep track of all my writings. What used to take up boxes upon boxes of notebooks, paper scraps, napkins, post its, basically anything I could use to jot down quick ideas when I became inspired, can be neatly organized in one or two word documents; easily accessible and ready for editing, printing, or even posting online or emailed to potential publishers. Not only that, but computers have become a literal NECESSITY for college and even high school, having to do internet research and writing papers to hand in for class, not to mention checking emailed assignments from professors. As handy as this all is, I still keep paper copies of all my writing, just in case my computer ever crashes or some catastrophic event happens to cause the loss of all my files. It is always a danger when working with technology, especially new technology that hasn’t had all the bugs worked out yet, and I had to learn that the hard way.

Technology and writing go hand in hand, and are mutually beneficial. If I didn’t have my laptop to be able to be creative and write whenever I need to, and have it instantly accessible when an idea strikes… I would literally go insane. Thankfully for everyone, I DO have the ability to write with it, so you’re safe… for now.