crash
Last week my G5 iMac started to act funny, and then it crashed. And
it crashed not in the friendly way apple computers are supposed to
crash, with a box that says we're sorry about this, please restart
your computer; not even the frozen screen or the spinning rainbow
cursor from hell; this crash made me jump as though two hands had
come out of my screen reaching for my neck.
Those of us who grew up on a mouse and keyboard interact with our
computer the way we interact with a stack of books on our desk, or a
refrigerator, or a bicycle. When I double-click on a folder of
halloween pictures, my brain treats the act of opening the folder and
the contents of the folder no differently than a physical photo album
sitting on my bookshelf. This is exactly the point of a
point-and-click interface, it feels like real life, but physical
photo albums don't crash, and the conflation of the real and the
digital represents an illusion that vanishes when on top of my pretty
digital desktop appears a smattering of uninvited, primitive
computer-text that starts with SYSTEM FAILURE.
My mother never let computers dupe her in this way. To my mother
computers are mysterious, fragile, not to be trusted. When she is
presented with digital information, her instinct is to bring it out
of the computer and into real life. I do exactly the opposite. I
recently acquired a boxful of family photos, and my reaction was that
they were too precious to stay in the box or even to frame and mount
on my wall, as my apartment is susceptible to earthquake, fire,
flood, and theft - I had to secure these photos for all eternity by
posting them on Flickr. Posting them on Flickr? Talk about being
duped. Flickr could tomorrow disappear off the face of the earth,
they could without warning start charging a zillion bucks a month, they
could sell my pictures to North Korea. What's more likely to be
around in twenty years, the bar mitzvah photo album that lives under
the coffee table in my dad's Philadelphia living room or Flickr? How
silly. When I got my computer to the repair shop, the technician
opened her up and showed me logic board stir-fry. Thank god for
extended warranty.
The appropriate way to deal with the illusion of data as real, and
not the invisible stream of particle-switches that it is, is to
create redundancy. The more it matters, the more redundancy you need.
I recently toured a medical helicopter that had two completely
separate engines, only one of which is used at a time. Think of your
computer workspace not in terms of what you would do if it crashed,
but in terms of how to minimize the inconvenience when it crashes. My
mom prints out emails I send her and saves them in a folder in her
solid oak desk.