I am Woman – Hear Me Click

Around 1990, by which time countless Americans owned personal computers, often simply because they were the latest cool, electronic, must have gadgets, I was offered a computer that someone was getting rid of, in favour of an updated model. I said “No, thanks.”

I couldn’t see the point of owning a sophisticated machine simply for the sake of owning it. I wondered how many people bought home computers and then used them only for writing letters or making shopping lists. It seemed like a waste of all that computing power, and I said that I would only get a computer if I had a specific use for one.

Well, ten years later I did have a specific use for one. What had changed to make my world converge with that of state of the art technology ? In a word, Internet. My husband and I heard more and more about Internet, as it moved beyond the realm of exclusively sex sites, and into the areas of information provider and e-business. We thought that it might be a way to market the children’s stories and art work that I’d been creating during my years as an artist, teacher, and children’s librarian, and later as a freelance storyteller and children’s entertainer.

You would have been hard pressed to find two well-educated Americans who had become more out of touch with technology over the years than we had. After researching the subject, we settled on a power Mac, which came to live with us or, one might say, came to take over our lives, in the summer of 2000.

We were so woefully ignorant that months were wasted on figuring out how to do very basic things but, by 2003 we had created two original websites using Dreamweaver, and had also created our own animated children’s stories using Photoshop and Flash. As our project developed, we each naturally became experts in different domains. My husband concentrated on Internet research, site optimization and animation procedures using Flash. I focused on writing articles, graphics development using Photoshop and using Dreamweaver for making web pages.

Now I’ve always considered myself to be a feminist, and I’ve never shied away from projects simply because they were considered to be “guy things.” I can even include a crude level of carpentry and masonry on my “been there, done that” list. I got past a fear of computers back in my grad school and library days, having been a librarian during the years when library after library was converting to automated catalog and book check out systems. Then, in the years before embarking on our Internet adventure, we spent several years in a home with no electricity or indoor plumbing, about as removed from the modern world as you could get, and as out of touch with new technologies as anyone might be.

When it came to high technology, I had no interest at all. Then , suddenly, we were immersed in it, day and night, for several years, and I was very surprised to wake up one day and find that I was our household’s resident HTML expert, not that I hadn’t learned the hard way.

I lack the patience for reading instruction manuals, and I frequently found that “how to” books assumed more prior knowledge than I possessed, or that they gave unclear instructions. This left me tearing my hair out when I couldn’t get things to work. Therefore, most of what I’ve learned has been the self-taught result of fiddling around, trial and error, and random experiments with new options. This is not a method to recommend, but one that allowed me to do what I wanted to do on our website. I must confess that I sometimes still stumble into the realization that I’ve done this or that in a stupid manner and need to redo it. There have also been numerous occasions when nothing but bullheadedness has kept us going until we have managed to resolve one technical problem after another. Still, over the years we’ve developed what we think is a pretty neat website for two former newbies. I suppose that in some strange technological twist of fate I have journeyed from the ultimate uncool anti-computer person to my own brand of over-aged computer geek. Long live the geek !