Around my home you will find a growing collection of broken debris of the digital age gone awry. Examples of these include a digital camera with a stripped gear that refuses to push the lens out anymore; a 1 TB hard drive containing irreplaceable family photos that my computer no longer recognizes; my first laptop computer, a 486 Toshiba with monochrome screen that refuses to power on; my current Macbook Pro which still functions but had coffee spilt on the keyboard and now requires an external keyboard because I’ve been too busy to have it repaired; an iPod Shuffle accidentally left out in the rain, a weatherproof video camera crushed last summer by a John Deere tractor; or heck, even the iPad upon which I am typing this has a cracked screen.
My point is, over the years digital mishaps have happened. I hate to throw these things out because they were expensive, representing now literally thousands of dollars, and also because they tell stories about an ever increasing part of our lives—our digital lives. It seems that everyone has these stories of suffering digital losses. It doesn’t even have to be a hardware mishap. Sometimes things that happen with our software or with our wetware that cause us the most angst. The person accidentally deletes the school database that wasn’t backed up, a virus corrupts an operating system, a person who unthinkingly tweets an insensitive tweet that gets them fired, the grieving spouse who deletes a deceased spouse’s Facebook account without warning to family or friends—anything that connects our lives to technology has the potential to cause us to suffer loss.
For this writing assignment, please describe a time in which you felt that your life might have been better if you had never laid eyes upon a computer because of some digital loss that you suffered. Describe in detail what happened, the emotions you felt at the time, and how you worked through it towards the best resolution that you could manage. In what ways was your life and outlook changed by the experience? How did the experience affect how you interact with technology and other human beings through digital media? What advice to others can you offer?
