Writing in this internet age
By: Teresa D Hawkes
Tags: Computer History, Medium, Memoir, Writing, Cyberspace

Writing in this internet age

Who I Am

Me in Stow-on-the-Wold’s Woolcomber Cottage after a bath in late 1956.

I was born into the Rock and Roll era, 1950’s TV (its own animal), and the high days of the 1950s-1970s just-burgeoning White middle class in these United States. Harlequin Romances and Nancy Drew filled girls’ heads with very different ways of being a woman, you know, a person with actual breasts.

Breasts are a form of power for ladies. We use them to stay alive, to make money, to find love (and hopefully respect), to make (and hopefully keep) many different kinds of love, to feed our babies, and to lose to breast cancer and advancing age.

I am 64 now, and have had those long-awaited breasts since I was 12.

Breasts are wonderful things. But, I digress.

Typical ‘me’ environment, circa 2009.

I was born with the itch to write, not for TV or movies (I don’t know why), but for the page. How many times did I cradle a book in my hands (surreptitiously in class) or by lamplight late at night? Stars in the sky many times?

I was also born into the age of typewriters and the mimeograph!

There were tools at hand!

The purple-toned ink, loud noises, and strange chemical aroma of the mimeograph produced tomes for first time poets, philosophers, and political soapbox proclaimers, as well as handouts for school teachers, meeting agendas for administrators, sheet music and newsletters for church groups, and all kinds of documents for small businesses.

Ancient Remingtons were in many households, including mine. My Dad could hit 120 words a minute with 98% accuracy on one of those.

Dad as a Tech Sgt. in the US Air Force, circa 1965.

Those old Remington typewriters aided the production of a lot of great literature (I am looking at you, Mr. Tolkien, dead these many years). I typed my first stories and poems on one of those, dreaming of being as good as Tolkien someday.

It wasn’t long before the wizards of efficiency gave us electric typewriters. The IBM Selectric was a thing of beauty, and I for one, felt close to heaven when using one.

I have never been one to handwrite anything. I am too impatient for that. Electric typewriters were THE TOOL of use for me as a writer. The wonders of the computer as a writer tool lay in the future, but I had a class in programming an IBM 360 mainframe with Fortran in the 10th grade. Of course, I saw sci fi TV and films with their glowing screened computers. I lusted for one.

Then, when I was in undergraduate school (circa 1975), my writer’s brain offered up a dream one night. I saw myself creating pages of poetry floating on a white screen. Some words glowed in that old mimeograph purple ink color, and if I touched one, I was taken to another page of poetry. I awoke sweating with my heart pounding. I lusted to be able to create such pages.

Time passed, and the personal computer arrived at last. The power of the page was lifted into the digital realm. I worked for my computer nerd friends as an office assistant as they wrote computer programs for the University of Oklahoma in support of scientists working on genetics. Those guys wrote on computers that used the CP/M operating system. Yep, this was before DOS.

The Apple microcomputer I used in that office hit my brain with its first primitive word processing program. I used that program and felt power surging through my fingers, knowing I would print that stuff out and distribute it wherever I could. I was IN LOVE WITH computers.

Then, we all know what happened next. The military internet masterpiece invention was shared with the rest of us and now, we all make glowing pages with links to other glowing pages filled with poetry, data, information, memoirs, family events, the latest greatest sports, and everything else of interest to humans.

In this Age, writers have been copiously blessed. There was the old Geocities where loads of us cut our teeth sending our words out into the void of cyberspace that was growing exponentially in scope and capacity. Suddenly, we could rent space on various servers and create our own websites using HTML. We could have our own domain names! Then came WYSIWIG programs at the personal and professional levels. Our glowing pages got more and more powerful in terms of artistic and literary expression.

Sure, I had a literary e-Zine (now defunct) that lasted for ten years before I went back to grad school to understand the biological basis of human mind, and earned a Ph.D in Human Physiology.

Since I graduated and have worked as a scientist, many new writers’ internet tools have become available…a dizzying array of tools. Medium and WordPress are two.

Now, I am ready to retire from actively doing science into getting my writing back out on the internet: a synthesis of what I have learned about what we think about human mind from the artistic, literary, philosophical, and scientific perspectives. I feel blessed.

I write about religion, philosophy, neuroscience, politics, statistics, social justice, feminism, science, humor, and history. I also write serial science flash fiction and poetry. I invite you to explore my work. I look forward to reading yours on medium.

Me, circa 2018.

I have nothing but love and thanks for the legions of people who have made the internet and its tools available to writers and readers in a place where every human mind can at last meet and conduct a congress of thought never before possible. From the Many, the One. How ancient is that aspiration among so many of us? Here it is friends. We are living it. We are writing it.