Dependence on Technology

So evidently OD is up and working again. *Sigh* I feel like this is going to end up being an OD slam diary, which was not my intention at all for it. I know every website has its issues, and I know the DM over there has a life outside running OD. But its a big deal to feel like you can’t access something you paid for. Something you’ve grown with. Something you’ve made friends through and built relationships.

All this crashing made me think about how much of our lives is stored online. I started writing on OD just after I graduated high school and moved away to college. I wanted a way to keep in contact with some of my friends back home, but also a place to store my new transition. It started off simple as that, but grew into something much more. Fewer and fewer of my RL friends knew about my OD. And I made "OD friends." As my life become complicated and frenetic, it became a place for me to write out my emotions and thoughts and feelings. I worked through a lot of issues on OD. I have a lot of memories, both good and bad stored up in its pages.

After The Hacking, where I lost a lot of stuff, I started downloading my diary and printing it up. I would reformat the entries to look nicer when I printed them out. I stored them in 3-ring binders and on a CD. I have no idea where that CD is now, and the digital copies are mostly on one of my two old laptops. Somewhere along the line, I got too busy and stopped downloading my diary. I stopped printing them up. This recent downtime of OD has made me really regret it. During one of the uptimes, I quickly downloaded everything in the past four years (I might need further back than that) onto my new computer. I still want to get it all printed up, and that will come eventually. But at least for now its on my computer. If the site goes down again, I won’t feel like I’ve lost part of my soul.

But how crazy is that statement really? How crazy is it that some of my most important memories and discoveries are stored in an online database? How crazy is it that the OD community flipped out not only due to lack of information, but due to the inability to access all those precious thoughts. When I was a child, I never was afraid of a website going down and destroying precious memories. And I’m sure my parents today don’t feel that at all. We feared fire and water destroying the things which held our memories. Now a server being down or a database error or whatever the problem seems to be can turn so many lives upside down.

There was a day when wikipedia crashed and went offline. Someone commented that a million college students were unable to finish their papers. I heard that professors across the country were shocked at how many students put in requests for extensions. I’ve never used wikipedia as a direct resource for a paper, but I’ve certainly used it to gain some information and even backtrace their own links to primary sources. What would happen if Facebook or Twitter suddenly crashed? I think the groaning and gnashing of teeth would echo across the country. Our society today depends so much on the internet and technology.

Twenty years ago, my dad was the dad who could fix nearly anything that broke in the house. From the plumbing to the electricity to painting to roofing to fixing the car or the lawn mower, he could do it. Everything could be done with his hands and basic household handy-man skills. Now, he’s outdated on the computer (he used to fix our typewriter all the time), the phone (I’ve seen him rewire our rotary phone when it dropped on the kitchen tile), the TV (digital cable?), the VCR (replaced with a DVD player), the stereo and record player (thank goodness he refuses to throw them out), the car (too many computer things in it for him to fix himself), the lawn mower – okay that he still tries to fix on his own. But he’s becoming useless. Everything needs to be taken to a store, or seen to by a professional, or is just thrown out and replaced with a newer model.

I don’t know if I’m really going to move my diary to another site. I don’t like change and I know my way around OD. Perhaps this latest OD problem will never be resolved and I’ll end up wandering around the internet until I find a new online diary home. Or perhaps it will be resolved and things will go back to running smoothly on OD.

Although… Maybe a fresh start wouldn’t be so bad.