Amongst colleagues and friends who work in front of a computer the majority of their day I’ve noticed an interesting and very modern facial tick. It’s a quick blink of both eyes, lasting longer and with more pressure than a normal blink. I do this myself and until recently I wasn’t really paying any attention as to why. The answer I’ve learned is that my eyes are dry and the normal, standard blink doesn’t provide enough relief.
So what to do with dry eye? A quick google gives a couple tips for how to avoid getting dry eyes. This page is pretty generic as the advice, as it should be, is totally basic and can be boiled down to two items: 1) lubricate your eyes more, and 2) spend less time in front of the computer. The first piece of advice is easy. Use eye drops, blink more often, work in intervals, drink more water, etc. The second piece is a whole different beast…
As a normal kid I wanted to be an astronaut after seeing space films, a paleontologist after visiting the dinosaur museum, a professional hockey player. Aside from hockey, which I played for 14 years, I did almost nothing serious to pursue those other careers. In the meantime though I pursued computers, not with any kind of intellectual drive, but just because there was this new thing I could do new things with. In grade 5 I had a loose collective of friends “coding” HyperCard choose-your-own-adventure games. In grade 6 I bombarded my Dad with a presentation about why the Internet was important to our family and was needed in our house. It only took one borrowed public-school Mac and an enormous free-trial of AOL bill, and they conceded. Our phone became permanently busy, and my Moms voice regularly came through the modem speaker over a scree of dial-tone noise. “Are you SURFING THE NET AGAIN?!” Oh, I was hooked and an IRC and a BBS later I was “hacking the planet” and starting my own hacker collective to be cool like Cult of The Dead Cow. I was trying Denial of Service attacks on major sites, reading 2600, and thinking that one day I could make it out to Defcon to hang with all the major players.
Of course, I knew very little beyond how to regurgitate the tricks I had read and use the software with the menacing skull icon. The point here is that from a very early age I was deeply fascinated, and more importantly, psychologically involved with the Internet and its seemingly endless supply of cowboys, visionaries, punks, nihilists, weirdos, and maniacs for whom normal personalities were only for the outside world and a truer manifestation of their personality lived online as “mut3″, “s4v4g3″ or “BongWizard”. Details aside, I believe this is a rather normal coming-of-age experience for someone growing up in similar middle-class circumstances with a home computer and an internet connection.
Personally, my involvement with the always-on, international community the Internet provided was compounded by puberty, a move from a small town in Western Canada to a nowhere suburb outside of Atlanta, Georgia and the crushing limitations of being a car-less, income-less teenager, in a yet-to-be-built southern neighborhood. The computer was flexible, could be modified with free or not-quite-free software to fit any needs I had, and when paired with the Internet could provide a seemingly unlimited source of inspiration, and an audience – far more receptive than anything local – to present any creative output to. Without the hard-and-fast limits of physical presence the only limits to involvement in this world were software skills and abilities – knowledge which was provided for free by various benevolent, idealistic, often-anonymous personalities. Personalities like “BongWizard”.
Throughout all of this I never wanted to be a software developer, my current line of work. Even after being one of the 5 or 6 guys from my high school to take the Advanced Placement Computer Science exam it never occurred to me that I should stay on that path and go to University to study Computer Science. To me, it wasn’t something for people who liked computers. It was for people who liked science. And by people I mean male-only people. The creative writing program I enrolled in had a very favorable ratio and I refused to see myself as a nerd or even worse, “computer person”. I actively avoided the image, and during my first two or three years at University I think I tried everything I possibly could to live completely on the loosely-typed side of things.
For better or worse, a large part of your personality isn’t something you can just ditch and watching a friend flounder in front of their computer as they wonder why it isn’t reading their mind is just plain cruel. During University this leads to dialogue like, “Hey dude, no worries. Saving a PDF is for nerds. Nobody knows how to do that shit!” After University it leads to situations like, “Not a problem, Boss. Maybe the software was broken. I’m surprised I got it to work!” and then *facepalm*, you can get paid for your computer skills, and certain skills are worth more than others. Simply put one foot in front of another down this path and your full-time job – 40 precious hours of your life every week – are dedicated to being that person with those computer skills – voila, you are a “computer person”.
You don’t have to be a computer person to be a computer worker and if I think of the many different career paths I could’ve taken most of them would’ve ended up sitting in front of a computer for a very large chunk of my waking hours 5 days of the week. While I have quite a few friends who are free from using the computer (butcher, waiter, retail, teacher) for the entire day, I would say the majority of my friends are generally in front of some kind of screen. As our social lives and work processes become more and more reliant on and entwined with the computer it seems like that balance will shift more and more to computer work. For me and probably those like me – a generation with a psyche and skill set deeply connected to digital information – it’s almost hard to imagine myself pivoting at this point and working in something so analog and so completely different. Is there something with similar interesting mental challenges, freedom of place, and value of craft that wouldn’t require completely retooling both psyche and skill set and starting over? More importantly, what are the unknown effects – far beyond bad posture and dry eye – of spending so much physically sedentary time navigating virtual moveable spaces?
