Technology as Addiction

A few moments before I sat down before the computer screen to compose what eventually became this essay, a tree branch fell across a power line near the Oregon-California border, causing a chain reaction in the matrix of power lines that cut off electricity to seven Western states and triggered an avalanche of problems across nearly half the country. The physical chain reaction reverberated chaotically through a parallel web of social and psychological interconnections, as freeways without timing signals jammed into great parking lots and drivers smashed into each other at street corners where the traffic light grammar of red-yellow-green had gone dead. In Los Angeles, with the air conditioners stilled in the midst of the summer's record-setting heat, people suffered dehydration and heat exhaustion, and many families were impelled to leave rooms that had become like chambers of an oven, to cool each other off on front lawns and backyards with the garden hose. In business after business, phones, computers, and electronic cash registers became hunks of useless plastic and metal. Internet junkies fretted at being denied the pleasures of on-line surfing, and the great web of electronic transactions at gas stations, supermarkets, banks, and businesses went silent. What Karl Stahlkopf, vice president for power delivery at the Electrical Power Research Institute, called "the largest machine that man has ever made" had failed, creating a cascade of other mechanical failures and challenging the public's faith in the infallibility of technology. ¹ The media quickly named it "The Great Blackout of 1996," and the disruption it created brought home in powerful terms just how dependent on technology the United States has become.

A more humbling thought, as with a crackle of static electricity the essay I had set out to write dropped into electronic purgatory, was just how dependent on technology I had become. I was at the end of a research project into the poetics of the Machine Age in America, and the years spent writing this inquiry into the sources of twentieth-century American attitudes toward technology had had unintended consequences. My own facility at typing, at speeds hovering around eighty words per minute, had led me to black out the network of nerves and tendons in my forearms, destroying my ability to write. Sometimes, after typing hard and fast for hours at a time, fire would branch through my wrists, or my hands and fingers would fall numb, but these symptoms dissipated if I let up for a few days. But after one particularly intense week's work they failed to disappear. The pains and numbness had developed into chronic tendinitis, and soon I found myself unable to type at all without inflaming and aggravating my hands and arms. I changed my life, typing softly to minimize the stress impact, changed my workstation to alleviate shoulder, arm, hand, and neck stress, took frequent breaks, stretched and did heat and ice treatments. I even hired a typist, for as long as my money held out. The problem, however, continued to worsen, until eventually I found myself to be a writer who simply couldn't write. It was now impossible for me to use computers, typewriters, or even the lowly technology of the fountain pen.

My salvation, surprisingly, came from the same technology that had caused the damage. I was passing through Seattle, having dinner with my old friend Hunter Fulghum, an engineer and freelance technical writer for various newspapers, whom I had seen rarely since we were tentmates in Kenya as teenagers. On learning of my disability, Hunter told me about a series of articles he had written about a new computer technology that had been developed to allow disabled writers to write without using their hands. After a long odyssey and much long-distance calling, I finally tracked down the companies that are the pioneers in this area. I now write through a program that recognizes my voice when I speak into a microphone and converts my words into...