Motherless Children
Almost all us old farts that use a computer these digital days are basically self taught. The student becomes the teacher. The blind, of course, are leading the blind. Most of us think a computer is a mail shortcut — we open it up, check our e-mail (mostly jokes and political rants), maybe forward a few, then go back to CNN or Fox News on the TV. Some of the more adventurous of us learn to download photos or music, maybe catch some internet news or use Google, but really we barely dip a toe in the oceanic vastness of what is someone’s Brave New World but certainly not ours.
We’re just tourists skimming the surface of a planet we don’t know how to land on, whose language we’ll never learn, whose inhabitants won’t notice us beyond the mosquito buzz we generate as we hover over a Mac or a PC or a smartphone. Meanwhile the world below is morphing before our eyes, but we have no clue and Wikipedia and Google aren’t much help.
Even the kids don’t really scratch deep. Oh, they learn a smidgeon of a complicated program for a job, Photoshop say, or Publisher, but beyond their current needs, the complexity is too overwhelming to retain if it’s not repeated day after day. The world is moving too fast now to keep up.
Maybe it always was. Gramp had to learn to drive the new fangled tractor, then he had to learn how to fix the danged thing. Most folks couldn’t change a tire much less tear down an engine. The computer goes blue or malware invades its brain, we’re adrift without compass or GPS in a forest at night, hopeless and helpless.
And totally dependent. We’ve become the children of the machine. It’s a loveless bargain, but … they’ve closed the orphanage and there’s no going home now.
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