Technology's great, but I'm great without too much new technology
The Reverend Thomas C. Willadsen
"Tom is to technology what Colonel Sanders is to chicken," a member of my church's ruling board said recently. I have a reputation for being hostile to new technology and innovation. This perception is not fair. I am profoundly indifferent to new technology. For the most part, I am content with the technology I am familiar with. I believe strongly that what I know and use and understand is good enough.
That rotary phone in the bedroom? Still works, good enough.
This camera that requires film? As long as I can buy film and the nice ladies at Morton's will develop it, good enough.
I will give up my daily newspaper delivered to my door when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers.
There's a harvest gold dishwasher in the kitchen where I've lived 10 years. I do not know whether it works. I suspect it does not. It was new before Nixon declared he was not a crook. I wash the dishes by hand until I cannot do that anymore. It is good enough.
I know time marches on and new inventions are designed to make our lives easier and more pleasant. For now, my life is easy and pleasant enough that I choose not to learn how to operate anything new, all right?
I have been called a Luddite, an epithet that is inaccurate and hurts me deeply. Luddites destroyed machinery in the 19th century because they believed the value of their work was diminished by new machinery. Luddites cared enough to break things. I do not care at all about new technology. If the new Nas recording came out on a wax cylinder I would buy it that way.
Still, I know that progress or something like it is inevitable, and I do not fight it. Once when someone observed, "Kids don't know how to tie laces anymore because they fasten their shoes with Velcro; it's an outrage!" I replied, "That's like complaining there's no blacksmith at the Nike factory."
Today, I consider myself the blacksmith at the Nike factory.
Last year I stayed at a motel that sold phone cards. I asked to purchase one at the front desk. The clerk looked in six different places before finding one. "How much?" I asked. He looked in more different drawers before he found my answer. As he searched, I commented, "I don't carry a cell phone." He stood upright, shocked, looked me square in the eye and said, "I didn't know there were still people like you!" I might as well have said, "Hey! I'm really getting the hang of walking on just two feet!"
A member of my youth group said that for him to leave his house without his cell phone is like forgetting his pants. I have had that dream. His necessity is my shunned nuisance. Try to remember a time someone got up from a meeting, took a cell phone call in the other room and returned, saying, "I'm really glad I had this little gem with me!"
Once in a while, I confess to getting a gleeful charge out of learning something new. I learned how to set my computer's spell checker for any of 129 different languages. This bit of knowledge did not improve my life noticeably. When I encounter a word I do not recognize, I look it up in the dictionary. Excursions through its pages are much more satisfying, better in all ways, than Googling. Once I looked up "feckled," a word which does not appear in Webster's. Then my eye fell on "feculent." (Look this word up, I beg you.) No high-tech search engine could lead to this kind of serendipity.
My church launched a new Web site last month (www.oshkoshpresbyterians .org). We are very happy with it, and it took a lot of time and effort to put in place. At one of our early meetings, our Web designer told us that people catch on to new technology at different rates. First there's "the bleeding edge," followed by "the leading edge." Next come the "early majority," then "the mainstream," then "the late majority."
"Where does Tom fall on that spectrum?" the committee chair asked.
"Amish," was the best answer we could think of. They still have blacksmiths, don't they?
This column first appeared in the Oshkosh Northwestern, February 8, 2009.