It’s hard, being a technophobe today. The condition is defined as ‘a fear, dislike or avoidance of new technology’, which in slow-moving times — involving a popular shift from the fountain pen to the rollerball, say — should be manageable, but electronic change is coming so fast now that one is rarely without an encroaching sense of panic.
We technophobes are often compelled to use technology, of course, and we can certainly sniff the magic of its portal into a world of limitless information. And so we pick up rudimentary skills, painstakingly and with a grudging suspicion, and our second-greatest fear becomes that this old, now-familiar technology will suddenly break down. When it does, our feelings contain the crude ingredients of grief: nostalgia, anger, abandonment and terror.
My personal meltdown began, recently, with the malfunctioning of the Blackberry Curve, a mobile telephone supplied to me many years ago by the office where I then worked. I remember the pure sulkiness with which I originally took delivery of the Blackberry, because it meant abandoning my battered Nokia, a chunky, simple-minded silver brick that had seen me through interesting times. The Nokia contained text messages that my husband had sent me on the morning of our wedding, but after I abandoned it the battery drained, the charger was lost, and the messages were locked forever inside its corroding electronic heart, perhaps never to be recovered. I still have the body of the Nokia, though: I’m sentimental like that.
In those days, circa 2008, Blackberry was the name to reckon with. Madonna was an avowed fan: she and Guy Ritchie slept with their Blackberries under their pillows, at a time when such an intimate attachment to a phone struck many people as unusual.
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