Well, thank God, the week that would never end is over and we can all go back to what we were doing before the Kavanaugh nomination, but not without another reminder of all the confusion and frustration that social media has wrought.
Just when all of the inflamed political posts disappeared from our Facebook feed, we started getting notifications from our friends that their profile had been hacked. This has probably happened to every Facebook user over the past few years, so most did as the Facebook message suggested and pressed the link which then sent the same message to all their friends. The cascade of posts and messages was inevitable and soon everyone was drowning in the same message.
This time, however, I paid attention. I was driving when my husband said that he had received a message from a friend that was similar to one I had received. Before he selected the link that would have multiplied the text, he contacted our joint friend and deleted the text.
I should not have been fooled at all. Unlike most of my peers, I should still have some knowledge of how computers and their applications work. I was a math major when I took my first programming class where we learned to code in binary as there were very few programming languages at the time. We even had to write our own compilers. From there I learned Fortran, Autocode, BASIC and COBOL. I have always worked with computers from the IBM mainframes to the IBM 5100 and the first Macs. I am still not afraid to take a PC apart, but I admit that technology has me increasingly more confused. It is taking over our lives and not always in the best of ways, and there is no place to go to escape it.
This past week, the hard drive on my PC crashed and I have lost my entire life. At least that’s what it felt like at the time. Seven years of photos, all our financial information, and all of my writing, down the drain. Well, not everything. For every cloud there is a silver lining and in this case, it is the fact that most of what we do nowadays is on-line and therefore always available.
As far as the financial information is concerned, I have paper records for all but the current year; records that are necessary because I must prepare a financial report for my brother and our income taxes are complicated affairs because of some rental property that we own, etc. I have started the tedious task of re-entering all of the current year and have convinced myself that the rest, with the exception of the paper records I have, is left to history. It’s probably for the best as all the information was just muddling up my mind.
With my writing, most of it is stored on-line, and while I will never know everything I am missing, again perhaps it was time to delete some of the clutter. That leaves the photos, a record of our lives for the past seven years. That’s when I realize that I have become too dependent on the technology.
When photos had to be developed and printed, we carefully stored them in albums. Now, we take hundreds of photos of our friends, our pets, our vacations and when the memory on our camera or flash cards gets full, we dump them on the computer and wipe the memory clean. Why do we call it memory if it can be so easily deleted? I still have photos on my i-Phone from the last four years but there are some I will forever miss. Unless a technician can miraculously pull the files off my hard drive, they are lost forever.
There is one bright spot. I have been frantically unearthing every flash drive in the house, hoping to find photos of the last few years, and behold, I found one with photos from before the first time I lost a hard drive. I know, how can you call yourself computer literate and experience two hard drive crashes? I found photos on that drive that I have missed for years; photos of Binna, the student from South Korea who lived with us one year.
I am so happy to have found them that it takes away some of the sorrow for the ones I have lost.
So, my love affair/frustration with technology will continue. There are a lot of things in life that frustrate us that we cannot live without. There are also a lot of things that we hold on to that are really unnecessary in the final analysis. Perhaps we need a hard drive crash every few years to put it all in perspective.