Deep down in our home computers, a computer virus may reside. Or maybe not? My wife’s computer was very sick, repaired and now sick again. Mine was sick for days but after some time on the phone with technical support persons seems to be better.
Until these extreme difficulties I did not realize how computer-dependent I was, writing and answering emails, posting on www.nonviolentcow.org and writing flyers, articles and such. I like to feel I am a “detached” person but just discovered an area of weakness.
In researching the life of Dorothy Day, co-founder of the Catholic Worker, for the web page Catholic Workers and the Military on Catholic Campuses, I discovered Dorothy Day was a prolific letter writer. She spent a couple hours a day writing personal letters. The letters I saw in the archives were typed or handwritten. Words were crossed out, corrected, even misspelled or with poor grammar.
I like to feel that if Dorothy Day were alive and writing today she would use a computer and maybe even email. Maybe not. But at least I can feel some comfort in her spelling and grammar errors since they are something I do. However, without spell and grammar checks on the computer and an excellent wiki proofreader, I would make Dorothy’s mistakes in writing look saintly.
When I was young it was said that technology would give us more leisure time. Now that I am old, I can see that technology makes us busier with less leisure time. Technological mistakes can make our life very frustrating.
We can learn from human mistakes in writing, but all we can do with technological problems is eliminate or correct them. In the meanwhile if we can stay detached from technology we can survive with fewer frustrations while things get fixed.
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