Guest Blog: "Your Brain on Technology" By ryandake
So there you are, writing your historical novel, and in your book
it’s 1735, and your hero has to take a poo, and you stop: have they invented
the toilet yet? So you leave the poor bastard grimacing while you get out Nell
Du Vall’s Domestic
Technology, and you read:
The toilet, or water closet at the
English call it, had several false starts. [...] Sir John Harrington, a man
ahead of his time, installed a toilet of his own design in his country house at
Kelston [...] in 1586. Harrington, who bathed every day, was considered a bit
eccentric and his invention did not become popular.
And before you know it, your allotted writing time has gone down
the crapper, because Nell’s book is so fascinating. But you know a lot more
about the technology of your chosen time.
If you’re writing only about your own current time, no
sweat--you’re swimming in the technological sea your writing is about. But you
step out of now at the peril of your work’s verisimilitude. If your brain is as
erratic as mine, you probably don’t even know your own technological past as
well as you think. Quick: when did Walkmans become ubiquitous? Hell if I know,
and I had one for years. Did the iPod come before or after the iTunes store?*
Fortunately we have Nell’s book (1988), and Wikipedia (2001).
Facts can be ferreted out. And speaking of Wikipedia...
Think about what a change it’s made. Before Wikipedia, you had to
find your car keys or bus pass, go to the library, bug the librarian, find the
correct reference work, and hunt through it until you found (or gave up on)
your targeted fact... now you just have to “go” to Wikipedia. If you know what
you’re talking about, you can even add facts to Wikipedia. We have infinitely
more facts at our disposal than even those poor slobs half a generation ago.
Are you, you monad, any different? And how has that technology changed society?
Technology shapes us just as much as we shape technology.
And Facebook! Oh, admit it, you’re a FB junkie. You now have
access to intimate details about the lives of perfect
(six degrees of separation) strangers, sometimes whether you want to or not. Has it changed you? What interactions has it brought to your life that
were unthinkable before 2004?
And Nutrasweet! Viscose (the fabric formerly known as rayon)! The
cotton gin! MRIs! GPS! Aibo! Man, the list goes on forever. Every one a death
knell to Natural Man. But if you’re writing, you’d best know when they showed
up, and what they did to that innocent creature and society.
Unless you’re worldbuilding sf. Then you have to make them
up, and they have to be convincing.
*2001 and 2003, respectively. The Walkman, for the terminally
curious, launched July 1979.
ryandake
is currently plotting the downfall of the United States of America, and how
Northern and Southern California will split the sheets, via her sf novel Tulare Lake, to be published sometime
before we all get our brains uploaded to AwesomeMommy, the giant AI in the sky.
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