“Let’s control technology”

Heard on the BBC Today programme this morning, music to my ears. 

I feel at the moment that I am doing the reverse, as if I am held in the clutches of all different kinds of technology whose secret machinations I do not understand.  I have spent many, many hours trying to untangle the intricacies of how to get my books into ebook format (the comparatively easier part) and then on to Kindle (fairly easy) and Apple i-bookstore (incredibly complex – still unresolved and requiring even more work at deciphering what is needed.  Thank Heavens for Guy!).  And then at the same time as all this, incomprehensibly from my present viewpoint, I have added my names to LinkedIn and Facebook, and have streams of emails pouring in apparently asking me to do all sorts of things I don’t understand.

So today I am taking the day off from all this technology, and instead am off to play piano duets for a blissful hour of Schubert and Mozart, before wandering on to Tate Britain to look at an exhibition there, or just sit in their café with a lovely book I am reading.  And since everybody knows I never look at my mobile phone unless in an emergency, for the time I am away from home I will be beautifully free from any contact with anybody demanding anything of me. 

As the lovely man on the Today programme said, “We should be managing technology rather than it managing us”.  Amen to that!

(Though, of course, I am using technology to post this blog!)