techno-ish

When my youngest daughter was around 6-8 yrs old, we'll say 7 ish, I asked her to be home from a friend's house by 5 ish. She asked, "Mom, which side of the 5 is the "ish" on?"  Of course, I cracked up while at the same time seeing this as evidence that she was a true linguistic genius, as are all my daughters. I've never forgotten her return because through the years it has become plain that the suffix--if we can call it that officially--"ish" can be considered a true language phenomenon.
     For instance, some people have an enormous amount of technological prowess. How did Facebook ever come to be? Who accomplishes that wondrous hacking into emails and private databases of world reknown corporations, individual government agencies, and for that matter, individual computer systems? How do they do that? Julian Assange should be carried into the city upon a royal palanquin as a hero (just an aside). And really, how did it come to be that untold hundreds of millions of "bits" of information can be saved on the tiniest of little square pieces that fit into the tiniest of computer bodies and be available in seconds with the tap of a finger. Well, those people and those kinds of technological knowledges do not qualify for "ishes."
     Who does qualify are we who think of technology as something useful to our daily lives and who know more about it than we give ourselves credit for--this lack of self credit being mainly because the people who flaunt technically-supreme knowledge and spit-fire skill leave us cowering in a corner, or try to. Yes, so many of us can be called "techno-ish" because we merely use technology. We can flitter (not twitter) through Microsoft Word--manuevering mundane thoughts into sheer brillancy by being masters of the delete, paste, cut, and copy functions. Or we have found many of the nuances built into email formats and internet searches and google books and google scholar and blogspot and news sources and . . . . . We also are more respectful of the not-so-obvious technology, i.e., that having to do with the history of modern day--before computers. How could life have progressed beyond the cave without wheels, scissors, knives, paper clips, and zippers! Yes, we techno-ishes have our feet on the ground and are not embarrassed that we don't know--or care--about coding for the internet or the mysteries of spending hours and days learning how to save time. It's all in the "ish."

The myth of the library

OK, so I just took one hour out of my life to talk to Laura at Dish Network who connected me to Chris, my own true love at this particular time, who guided me through approximately one hundred and fifty-two thousand feet of black cords and in whose name (he is named after St. Christopher even though he's Spanish and I'm sure very handsome) I now declare "what in hell is this one loose cord supposed to hook up to??" Technician arrives between 1 & 5 this afternoon. Too bad it can't be Chris, my own true love.

     Technology and I have a love hate affair going on that is familiar to many. I believe, however, that things will come around full circle if the world is not blown off its axis first. For instance, I just took my English 1000 students for a Library instructional period during which Wayne a friendly and smart librarian demonstrated all kinds of  technological reasons why people needn't darken the door of a real library, ever again. All one needs is a good internet connection and off she goes. Did you know that Google now has digitalized hundreds of thousands of books?! I'm talking from 5 to 95 % of the text of these books is free and open to everyone. We can print them out, these pages of text. We can also find anything about any topic for research papers in approximately five minutes--after practicing on the computer with a library's multiple database opportunities.
      BUT, I predict that sitting in front of a computer screen either to read the stuff or to find it will become warying and that the social aspect of being human will just naturally take over--sometime in the future--I'll probably be dead. People will once again want to go sit quietly in a library, fall asleep while reading--in the library, the greatest place for naps in the world, and/or whisper their way through a conversation rather than take it outside. Libraries play lots of roles in our lives and the role of "book depository" is just one. Perhaps the fact that people (students --who are people, really) don't HAVE to go to a library anymore, will work ironically in favor of --well--going to the library. No pressure. Just nice quiet, sometimes musty smelling--sometimes sweet--rooms with hundred foot high windows and ancient lattice work and solid oak and real brass and nowadays that rich coffee smell that noone can really describe with words. Yes, people will be back to libraries and I hope libraries will stay around long enough to be there for all the returnees.