Old Lady in the Digital World

O.K. I am trying my best. I was an early adopter of these things and I wanted my kids to have access to computers, so we bought the first computer, an Apple, more than thirty years ago. Of course, we were all hooked, we learned how to program games and we endured the clackety clack noise of those first printers. The internet was in its infancy.

Time passes and I have had many computers and gone from the very slow dial-up to satellite to DSL and beyond. My first computers were Apples and then for a long time I switched to Dells that had more currency in my work life.

While all this was happening I adopted the cell phone life, and was thrilled with my first smart phone!. Of course, it was able to do more than I needed and its interface was ever seeming too small for my middle aged eyes. Not to mention my fingers that refused to be able to text.  On to the iPhone and a steep learning curve of texting, Instagram, and all the rest.

And now I have a brand new huge Apple desktop and this is a wonderful toy. In these days they do not give you any instructions. You get to figure it out yourself, and if you can't shift those photos to another album you can always click help.

I used to think that my computer was my inside pocket of privacy. No more. If my Mac can automatically provide the correct spellings and even find faces in photos and find so much else, including where the photo was taken, I have got to revise my thinking.

When looking at Google Earth looking down on our very private 300 acres, I saw that every single cow, every single plant in the vegetable garden, is visible! Yikes!

I suppose that for most of us our privacy is in the sheer vast numbers of us out there in the digital world. and so we hide in the crowd. Who is going to look us up on Face Book amongst 600 friends?  And yet, I know that nothing on our computers is really private. Our comings and goings are photographed on security cameras many times a day as we go about our business in stores and gas stations and all the rest.

Now, being seventy-two, I have come to realize that all the stuff I have written is not important in this vast world of writings. My kids can read my book, the documents in my computer files are mostly temporary and I delete them as necessary. Maybe they are permanently in clouds. I do not need to keep vast files and I can delete them as I do the boxes in closets and the hangers of clothes no longer wanted.

This is a whole new world and I am at the tail end of it. Where is it going? What will this mean for our children and grandchildren?

Meanwhile, I am doing the best I can with this new technology and loving every minute of it.  I am thankful I do not have teenagers under my responsibility because they are so vulnerable, though I would love to have one of them sit by my side and easily tell me to click on this or that.

But Siri soldiers on, helping me navigate everything.