Juliet's a bit of a Luddite

When I was a young teenager, I dialed my best friend’s number one day (dialed, get that? On a rotary phone, no less)… and a machine answered.

A machine.

I hung up.

I tried again. Stammered, blushed, and hung up.

Then I got peeved. I declared to any and all that would listen: “Machines shouldn’t answer phones! What’s this world coming to?”

My father (fiddling with his newfangled eight-track tape deck) called me a Luddite. Since I had no idea what he meant – though I knew it was some sort of insult-- I looked the word up in the dictionary (which used to consist of reams of paper bound together, like an old fashioned book.) And then I checked out the encyclopedia (NOT Wiki-anything-- an actual set of books that sat on the small bookshelf in our front hall).

The Luddites were British textile artisans in the nineteenth century who fought against the kinds of mechanized changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution. Some of them went so far as to smash weaving machines, an anti-progress crime considered so threatening it was made a capital crime by the Frame Breaking Act. In recent years, the terms Luddism and Luddite have become synonymous with anyone who opposes the advance of technology due to the cultural and socioeconomic changes that are associated with it. This isn’t the same thing as being phobic: A technophobe is afraid of technology per se, whereas a Luddite fears the changes it wreaks.

Yes, it’s true: I am a Luddite. I’m very thankful for some technological advances –antibiotics spring to mind—but in general, machines make me nervous. Computers annoy me. (For example: I don’t understand why things on the computer need to be upgraded just when a person figures out the last round of updates.) I don’t watch television, can’t figure out the neighbor’s TiVo to save my life, and I still don’t have an Ipod. (I liked LPs and turntables – you could pick up the needle and change things up. And as a bonus, your Barbies could go for a funhouse ride.)

More importantly, it worries me that so much of what we do these days, so much technological innovation, takes us away from one another. Rather than converse, we fixate on machines and computers. Rather than create and invent, we passively watch other people’s ideas of what is entertaining. Rather than question, we accept.

I have a teenage son at home who will argue until he is blue in the face that technology is a good thing, that “progress” is inevitable and positive. And I do hope he’s right. But it doesn’t escape my notice that much of climate change and species extinction and social alienation can be laid at the feet of advancing, blind technology.

On the other hand…I sit here composing at my home computer, blithely enjoying the benefits of technology. And though a part of me thinks that renaissance Europe was just about advanced enough for the likes of me, I LOVE indoor plumbing. And living longer, healthier lives. And email – though there again, I am nostalgic for yellowing stacks of handwritten letters, tied together with old silk ribbons, stained with tears and kisses.

But I did finally learn how to talk to answering machines. So I suppose even this old Luddite can learn new tricks.