I am a technophobe.  There, I admitted it.  The Unabomber, George Orwell, my hardheaded grandfather and I are all members of the same fraternity.  I am in the closet no longer.  Just because I don't blow up buildings doesn't mean I'm not afraid of the unrelenting onslaught of technology.

I went to high school in a small town in rural Illinois, and until the age of sixteen, I was able to survive without touching a computer.  In fact, the only one I remember seeing on a regular basis was the one in the corner of the public library.  Up until my junior year in high school, that computer was just about the loneliest thing in the world.  Most of the people in town used a computer for one of two things: word processing or playing video games, and anybody who really had any desire to do either of these owned a computer or had access to one at work.

The librarian's daughter used to set books on top of that computer when she was sorting them out to be reshelved.  I always thought of the computer as just that, an overglorified bookrack.  I laughed to see a tall, precariously balanced pile of books on top of the monitor, which was all but hidden by its dust cover body bag.  I laughed because I am a technophobe, and to see it being used in this manner reassured me that computers were, quite obviously, a waste of time and money.

Then the e-mail epidemic began cropping up in cities across the nation, and it spread quickly.   Like all innovations, it eventually made its way to the Middle West.  The outbreak in my hometown started where I least expected it: in that eternally slumbering computer sitting underneath the stack of book returns.  It happened overnight.  The computer was wired to the Internet.  The small weekly local paper pushed the Knights of Columbus hall off the front page to run a story about the Information Superhighway. Clouds brooded on the horizon and little children tossed uneasily in their sleep.

I was good friends with the librarian’s daughter.  We went to the same high school.  She was in my circle of friends.  We were juniors. She was the first to get an email address.

The situation was that somewhere near seventy percent of the people who go on to college after graduating from my high school attend the University of Illinois.  There, the networks and systems for communication by email were already well in place.  Suddenly, there was a means for instant communication with friends, children, and old boyfriends who were going to school far away.  Email caught on like wildfire and soon it was the telephones in our town that were looking lonely.  About two weeks after I had last chuckled to see the library computer being used as a bookshelf, the library had instituted both a waiting list and a twenty-minute limit for using it.  I don't think I ever saw that computer turned off again.  They might as well have just thrown away the clear plastic dust cover.
 
The girls in my circle of friends, who were all friends of the librarian's daughter, had an added advantage over the rest of the townspeople.  Through her connections they were able to sneak into the library after hours and communicate with their friends at U of I ad nauseum.  They were the first apostles of email in our town, preaching the virtues of the new way to all who would listen.

We wouldn't listen, myself and the other guys in our circle of friends.  First of all, we were all technophobes.  We were all artists: writers, painters and musicians, and artists are notorious technophobes.  Also, I’m sure the simple fact that they were so excited about it caused a negative reaction in us.  We were cynics.  My senior year, the girls would constantly talk about their email escapades and we would constantly ridicule their newfound obsession.  To us, this whole email business was nothing more than an instrument for petty chitchat and gossip.  That sort of thing may have been fine for the ladies, but we were men. It was just female silliness, the modern equivalent of passing notes in junior high school.  We were seventeen-year-old boys, and if you couldn't drink it, drive it, grope it, or break it, then it was just female silliness.

 Everything changed when I moved away to college.  One of the first things we were given was an email address.  Freshman year, my imaginary mailbox sat empty, useless.   I stuck firm to my technophobic ideals.   Then, sophomore year, I had to use it for a class.  I had it activated.  The flood was unleashed.  Less than twenty-four hours after it was reactivated, there were three messages waiting in my inbox.  One was from the company that makes my email software, congratulating me on my bold leap into the future.  One was from this scary psychotic girl who used to have a stalker crush on me in high school.  One was from the librarian's daughter.  It was the first time I had heard from her in two years.

So I started emailing people back, eventually on a daily basis, and asking my friends who went to other schools for their email addresses, and even occasionally looking up old friends who probably didn't want me to find them.  It wasn't exactly a complete conversion.  Email was still my least favorite means of communication, but it was also the easiest, and so it kept me in touch with a lot of people I probably would have been too lazy to stay in contact with otherwise.

Towards my senior year, my email habits expanded.  I had become active in a lot of campus organizations.  With the help of the mass mailing list, I could get general announcements to every member of an organization in about five minutes, all at around four o'clock in the morning.  Email became indispensable.

I still object to email.  It scares me with its impersonality, its cold efficiency.  It seems almost too easy.  Only now, I am a hypocrite. That doesn't bother me much.  One thing you learn almost immediately as a technophobe is to get comfortable with hypocrisy.  There is no way to avoid technological advances.  New technologies create their own necessities.  If everyone communicates through email, then the technophobe is left with little alternative.  Such is life.

That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with email. The process seems to move too quickly.  On a whim, in moments, I can tell a hundred people exactly what is on my mind or send them an announcement that just popped into my head.  Afterwards, I often sit and wonder, "What did I just say to them?”  There is no time to think it over.  As soon as a thought occurs to me it is transmitted.  Within seconds, it is out of my hands.

One of my email regulars is my friend Renee, who now lives in Texas.  We only knew each other a few months before she moved, and we talk twice as much over the Internet as we ever did in person.  One day when I came home there were ten messages from her in my inbox.  I wondered what was wrong; I had received her regular email just two days before.

It turns out that my mailbox was full of forwards, emails that someone else had sent to her and that she had then directly copied and passed off to me.  This is a whole new genre of emails: forwards.  There is a button that you can push, just single keystroke, and whatever was sent to you will be sent to whomever you choose.  These particular forwards were all copies of jokes that had been sent to her.  They began to arrive on a daily basis.  They weren't very funny.  Jokes usually aren’t when you write them out like that.

Bob Paxson was my English teacher in the fourth grade. He was a master of the joke.  Everyday, before class, he would tell us a one.  That was along time ago, but I can still remember all of the jokes he told.   And when I remember them, I hear them in his voice.   I can see his gestures and, more importantly, his facial expressions.  He had amazing rhythm.  He was the master of that most revered and elusive of all storytelling talents, the comedic pause.   He had a feel for how much time each punchline required to set itself up in the mind of the listener.   His delivery was perfect to the microsecond.

Part of the joy of Mr. Paxson’s jokes was that I knew him.   I understood each story as a reflection of him.  He didn’t tell a joke the same way as my mother or my grandfather or any of my friends.   When he told a joke he breathed some of his own life into it.  It wasn’t a simple gag with a setup and a punch line; it was a work of human art.

An email joke has no voice.  It is like the sheet music of a good song; it is merely the skeleton, and only with a great effort of imagination can the reader see any relation to the work of art it attempts to convey.   It is a poor substitute for the real thing.

The Bob Paxson breed of joke artist is in the process of becoming extinct.   He is no longer a necessary entity.   He has joined the litany of the obsolete.  Today, anyone with access to a computer can receive the best jokes, thoroughly tested and agreed to be clever, witty, and insightful by everyone who has chosen to forward them.  But, for all that, these jokes seem somehow mysterious, foreign, and hollow.

Bob Paxson himself was dead long before I got my first e-mail address.  There will be no need to replace him.   So maybe the jokes aren’t so funny anymore; at least you get more of them, and you can read them faster.  I miss Bob Paxson’s jokes, but I wouldn’t wish him back from the dead.  I wouldn’t wish anyone into a life where his usefulness has been usurped by technology.  In a way, he was lucky.  Some people are forced to go on living long after they are needed, or even wanted.   Blessed are they who die before they become obsolete.  He will not be alone, either.  With the advent of Internet and email communications, it is not just the human face that is disappearing from our culture.  The human voice is disappearing as well.

But, as I said, all technophobes are hypocrites.  I write this on my brand new computer.  When I am finished, I will check my email and go to bed.  But every night it gets a little harder for me to sleep.  For though I do not deal in jokes, I do consider myself a storyteller.   And everyday I see myself going the way of Bob Paxson, as technology sucks the ground out from underneath my feet.  I, too, am in the process of becoming obsolete.  And unlike Bob Paxson, I’ve got many years of life ahead of me. HOME