From: WWOOD@LUCY.WELLESLEY.EDU
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.mbu-l
Subject: Re: Computer Travels (long message)
Date: 14 Oct 92 02:46:00 GMT
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
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Jim,
Thanks once again for your lovely and lucid account of your computer
travels.  It was your Tule lake experience that got me this time, your
question, "Are computers worth it?" in the face of all this--this being
a million birds and the echoing Modoc petroglyphs.  It is a question I've
asked myself many times of late, as I feel that inexorable pull into the
screen before me.  I ask it when my 6-year-old urges me to write with
a pencil rather than with the computer ("you're wasting so much electricity,
Mommy").  I ask it when I take my children to the Audobon model farm and
realize that this is all they will know of farming, all they will know of
much of the life that is for me part of my blood.  For them, simulation,
instead of the rough feel of a cow's rump and the smell of a barn.  Work
for them means Mommy clicking away at the keyboard until 1 am, not Mommy going
out to rescue a calf born far out in the pasture in the middle of a March
snowstorm.  For them, a screech owl is some scruffy creature penned in a
cage and not the source of haunting calls that come from the branches of a
tree over your house at dusk each evening.

I ask this question when I take them to Plimouth Plantation, as I did this
weekend, where you can stand in the middle of a dirty 17th century village
and gaze out over the headland to the ocean stretching off to England, and
feel for all the world as is you and your fellow Pilgrims are the only
human beings on this whole vast land (not counting the Indians of course).
And there, talking to the actors who really convince you that they are
William Bradford and company, I found part of the answer.  For when I asked
them (at my daughter's request) what they did when their clothes wore out,
they assured me, with consummate arrogance, that "indeed, Ma'am, the ship
from England comes once a year; we wouldna be makin' our own clothes, Ma'am--
our men are farmers.  Ye wouldna be havin' a man practicin' two trades, now
would ye, Ma'am."

And I saw my whole line descended from tradesmen and opportunists, folds
--whoops, folks--who beheld a wilderness and thought only to tame it.  So
there's part of the answer.  It doesn't justify the inexorable push, but
rather only explains it.  Sort of.

A second more satisfying answer I think I'll think about when I'm less
tired.  It has something to do with those ships making more and more
frequent ships across that big dangerous ocean and the Pilgrims waiting
eagerly not just for goods, but for news of home.  It has something to do
with why we're all here.  The powerful lure of a global network.
Communication.

Enough said.  It's late, and I guess I felt like blithering.  We finished
installing our last Daedalus station today and I'm about to teach my
first class in our classroom on Thursday and I guess I felt like doing a
little sober look backward before taking that big leap forward.  I guess
you struck a chord, Jim.

Wini Wood
Wellesley College
wwood@lucy.wellesley.edu