I miss spelling. Photos that meant something because they were rare. Real mail.
Much has been gained with digital technology and I for one don't want to go back to the time before it existed. The social, creative and political benefits are too good to give up. But some things I grew up with have been lost, and I mourn their passing.
Spelling: When I first started using computers and word processors in the late 1980s, I turned the spellcheckers off. I was a good speller and as a point of intellectual pride I was damned if I was going to let a machine erode that skill and euthanize my language-related neurons. Now I use spellcheckers for everything, including for writing this column. Blame sheer volume for that: I edit thousands of words a day for an audience that for print remains stern in pointing out errors. (Online audiences either shrug off mistakes or don't see them thanks to the shiny things distracting them on the web.) So I need machines to help me out. Spellcheckers are in every app now, including email and browsers, and I've given up turning them off. On smartphones and their clumsy screen-based keyboards, I can't type out a coherent sentence without machine help and it shames me. It's like my brain is forced to use a walker.
Photos: I remember as a kid seeing photos in the homes of my grandparents. Mainly portraits of family, they were mounted on shelves and walls, where they were displayed for years. They had pride of place because they pretty much were the only photos they had because until a decade ago, photos were rare, expensive and difficult to produce for ordinary people.
Consider my greatgrandfather August Link, an ethnic German immigrant from Ukraine who, stories go, raised horses for the tsar, refused military service for his sons, crossed the ocean, travelled by wagon in the American west, founded churches, farmed as a pioneer, survived three wives with whom he sired a litter of children and was married to a fourth at his death when he was buried with his tobacco. And I have seen exactly one picture of him. You can imagine the power of that sole image. To this day, I don't even know if a digital copy of that picture exists since I've only seen physical reproductions.
Now consider that the other day I was at a Vancouver Canadians game. I took a picture of my lunch - my lunch! - and blasted it out to the world on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. I also took pictures of my colleague Michael Kissinger doing the chicken dance. Last night I took a picture of my cat. Today, one of my laundry. And that's light use compared to most people armed with a phone connected to social media networks. We drown in a sea of instant imagery. August would want to throw me a life preserver.
Mail: When Canada Post announced not long ago that it was ending home delivery for most Canadians, I shrugged. I get nothing in the mail of value. It's bills, pitches from realtors and endless piles of advertising crap. Even packages or purchases now come largely through private delivery companies.
It wasn't that way for me before. As a kid, I'd get cards from relatives on my birthday and at Christmas. I'd wait for weeks for books and games I'd ordered by mail. As I grew up, I became a prodigious letter writer, and so did my friends. Letters took time to write (usually by hand), time to arrive and time to read. The waiting for important letters - from close friends, girlfriends, colleagues I was collaborating with in faraway cities - was painful, anxious, frustrating. .. and wonderfully so. The mail carrier's coming was a celebration.
Now it's email and social media and more messages and forms of communication than I can handle in a day. Even my mom sends weekly updates to the family by email. They're warm and well written, but not the same as getting a letter from mom. And in an era of keyboards, I couldn't pull off a handwritten letter if I tried. I can barely fill out a cheque, which I also use less of thanks to ubiquitous credit card terminals.
My world is poorer for these lost experiences. What have you lost to the digital world? What do you miss? Let me know.
