BUYING A PRINTER (2)
What I was going to write about here was buying a new printer. But I realize that what I am really writing about is the place of technology in my life and more than that, my own passage through the opportunities provided by new technologies. I am 85 years old and the subject that fascinates me for anyone my age is the rapidly changing world of technology and how as an old person I can find ways to use technology in ways that makes my life much richer.
Technology has radically changed my life again and again. Buying a printer reminds me that I am only barely aware of the opportunities that the new digital technology offers me and if I close my eyes for a second I miss out on some new transforming way of seeing or doing.
This is even more true for me than for most Americans since I spent my school years in India without technology, without television, without radio, no connection to popular music except for the five long playing 33 rpm records my father brought back from business visits to the United States, no telephone, no refrigerator, no vacuum cleaner, no lawn mower and only for a year or two a car which was only used for college business.
When I returned to the United States after high school I slowly adapted but never quite fit in to the whirl of rapidly changing America.
But it was the digital age starting in the mid 1980’s, the computer, that changed things most for me and which opened up new worlds and is still opening up new worlds. The word processing computer was a magic typewriter, and then came in a rush the Internet and digital cameras, and countless TV channels, and streaming everything, and on and on becoming cheaper and cheaper and easier to use until now we are within such rapid change that change is breathtaking and overwhelming and is certainly turning things upside down. In my understanding this rapid change in manufacturing, transportation, entertainment, education is so dislocating that it is threatening the identity of everyone, with half of the country yearning to go back to the good old vanished days and the other half wandering uncertainly forward. Everything is threatened: racial identity, work identity, national identity, gender identity, religious identity, total identity. Grasping for identity has so polarized us as Americans that we can hardly talk to each other. The more we try to hang on to what is fundamental to who we are, the more what is fundamental seems simply relative and temporary and elusive. It is getting harder and harder to be a fundamentalist—Hindu, Moslem, Christian, Buddhist, American, British, Russian, Chinese, male or female—because everything fundamental seems to be shifting or falling apart.
And in all this radical change with everything shifting, even buying a printer is complicated. But the reason for buying the printer is because Susie was mentioning a project that she would like to try which is taking photographs of family objects and then cutting these up and making collages of the photographs, of objects we have surrounded ourselves with from flea markets or India or Germany and are going to have to dispose of. In a sense it is hanging onto to and preserving some of our own family identity before I die and this house has to be sold and all the objects scattered. But it requires learning new skills that will lead to more new skills as the technology changes.
I realize that all of those printed photographs I sold were an attempt to share what touched me about India and Sri Lanka, and so were the 40 photo books that I made and both home printing which was so difficult before and home publishing which was impossible before and all of the things that I can personalize through technology that were impossible before, certainly impossible when I was a child in India, are now possible. And with artificial intelligence there are going to be many, many new possibilities. My flitting around from country to country on inexpensive flights and staying in Airbnb’s and finding my way with GPS and staying face to face with family at home through Facetime are all due to technology. I have to adapt and adapt and adapt if I am going to keep up with the things that can enliven me.
The new printer which now will print even more beautifully than the old one, be accessed wirelessly, will let me do high resolution scans and enlarge and shrink photos with beautiful inks at 1/20th the cost of cartridge ink will let Susie and I do all kinds of things we couldn’t before. Even the learning curve will be much simpler because technology is simplifying everything.
So buying a new printer which will be certainly outmoded in three years or sooner brings all of this to mind. The old mythic journeys took a life time of gradual change, the new mythic journeys are a rollercoaster of rapid change through a new world every day.
But writing this makes me realize that I need a way to share those photographs I used to sell if anyone is interested in seeing them or putting them up on the wall and I need to find a way to connect people with Blurb if anyone would like to leaf through those photo books I made which can be leafed through on Blurb without even buying them. I, too, don’t want to lose the past or at least to let it vanish as everything digital will vanish, not leaving a trace.
Yet keeping up, even buying a printer and learning to use it, is difficult. It comes next week and I’ll have to try.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 