Grow up, Sit Down, Log on

by Rich Mackin
illustration by Rich Mackin

I became a grownup this year. Let me say that by grownup I do not mean adult. The two are related, but different. I have been an adult for a while, voting, paying taxes, drinking legally, having sex, working, adult stuff. If I choose, I can watch adult movies, because I am an adult. Not that adult movies contain “mature content,” which is ironic, since most of it is pretty immature. Anyway, I already digress.

Webster‘s defines an adult as “a physically mature person.” A grownup is a less tangible thing. Most adults have jobs, which are not “what you want to do when you grow up.” If you played with your little cousins at a family gathering, you would not be lumped in with “the grownups,” usually people with careers and children. Adulthood is the product of growth, but there isn’t a specific line of separation. Any child can tell you who a grownup is and who another child is, the two might as well live in different worlds.

It would be easy to say that I became a grownup because I got married this year. This is not so. Sure, being married is something grownups do, but my wedding involved clown noses to a great extent, so it was not really a grownup-oriented wedding, that and the fact that most of the people there, even most of the adults, weren’t grownups. No, I have a specific moment that I became a grownup, and it involves candy.

I have a job. Been there over three years. That in itself is precariously teetering on grownupness, but not in itself a grownup-making event. I even have a coworker who I am pretty sure will never be a grownup, as she obviously spends most of the day pretending to be a fairy princess. But I also have coworkers with kids. Not babies, kids. I have several friends my age with babies – that is pretty grownup, but still not always completely. By the time the child starts walking and talking and counting as a person, well then, you got yourself a parent who is definitely a grownup. Grownups, like misery, love company, and so like religious zealots, try to make you one of them. I fell for this trap. I was confronted by a coworker, my age who has children and asked if I would buy candy for a fundraiser. Liking candy and being polite, I bought some, only to realize that I had crossed over to the other side. This was an issue where the line was clear. Children were assigned to sell candy for fundraisers, at which point they hand it over to adults, who sell it to other adults. I have passed the point of no return.

One aspect of being a grownup is buckling down and buying a computer. Slightly different from “having” a computer, since most people that I know who “have” a computer never actually bought it, they just “have” it. This usually means someone else bought it a while ago. Others have access to a computer, which means they work with a computer that they have claimed. I have buckled under the pressure of society to actually get one of these things, and so, am a whole person in the eyes of the status quo.

I apparently have to say I own a Mac, because branding is the focus of computers. People who would never care to hear the brand of underwear or toilet paper I buy insist I refer to all my computer stuff by its proper name. “I bought a printer!” I proudly exclaim, technologically behind enough to be amazed that I can make stuff magically appear on paper. “What brand? Inkjet? Laser? What sort of port? What model?” is the immediate reply, they have an Upson dotspeckle 9 million and want to compare notes. “I bought a printer!” is my only reply.

Now, for a long time, my computer friends were all telling me how much I need a computer. “Why?” I ask. “So you can email.” “I have a phone,” I say. “You can write.” “I have a word processor,” I reply. “You can surf the Net.” “I can go to the library or Tower Records’ magazine section,” I counter.

Having a computer means email. But email itself is almost not as important as finally having an answer to “What’s your email address?” To many people, saying “I don’t have email” provokes a sort of confused offense. Like telling a devout Christian that you’re an atheist, they don’t only disagree with you, they can’t fathom the concept. I have had actual conversations in which people asked me to email them, and when I explained the lack of email in my life, they refused to acknowledge phones or mail, and forced their email address on me anyway, telling me that I could contact them next time I was at a cyber cafe or whatnot.

Of course, now that I have email, I thought I would be free from social criticism. Nope. Now I am getting flack from those who I know who have no email. They are concerned that I will become one of those email people, like the ones mentioned above, who race home after work to email the people that they just worked with. The illusion is that email replaces phone and writing. For many people, this is actually what they do, so impressed with technology that it becomes all encompassing, and they don’t contact anyone ever by anything except email. “Email will make you antisocial” is one legend. “Email replaces human contact” is another, as is “we’ll never hear from YOU again.”

The thing is, while it CAN replace these things, it doesn’t have to. There is a third choice. I never wrote a letter to someone that lived in my city to express an idea that I could just say over the phone. Sometimes I will send someone a photo in the mail instead of describing it over the phone. Now I can email stuff to people at 5am so that I know they will get it, but I don’t have to wake them up or spend 33 cents. I can email 50 people at once. Again, I am still new enough at this to be impressed by stuff many have known for years. The computer people shout hurrah at my conversion.The thing is, my ability to send free email comes with my monthly connection service that is lumped in with my hefty computer price. The thing is, unless you really need and use this stuff a lot, you might as well save the money. If you are not an author or student with lots of term papers, the fact that you can easily manipulate text isn’t really a time saver when you calculate all the time it takes to start and program and work in order to make money to buy the thing. For the most part, the average person having one of these things is like someone having a five CD changer when they only own two CDs. It’s nice, but not really needed.

I really was impressed with the idea of email when I realized that bulk emailing everyone I know takes four seconds longer than emailing one person. But why do I need to email everyone? The fact that I just saw a cable access show that had a weird blue tint to all the color, but the thing is, the people on it were all Catholic priests and guys in grey suits, so the only color was in their faces, which looked blue. Remembering that in Japanimation, blue people are almost always evil, I set out to write a silly essay about it and figured I could share my insights.

It is as if I have fallen into the technology trap. People don’t acquire technology because they need it, they invent need because they have it. I witness this a lot at copy shops where computer owners design beautiful multi-color fliers for whatever-they-need-fliers-for that have color and grey scales and photos BECAUSE THEY CAN. Of course, then they want to photocopy the flier, which means the colors will be grey, the greys will be ugly, and the photos will be blobs. Of course, if they just wrote in black pen, the image would convey all their info and reproduce well. I complain about these people all the time, but joined them when, for some reason, I thought everyone needed to be warned of blue priests. I did it because I could. Not important, but it did get a reply from pretty much everyone I sent it to.

This may be the biggest counter to the email-as-antisocial behavior idea. I wouldn’t have called everyone I know with this, nor would I mail them. But with email, I have had some small contact with many. I still saw those I normally see, called those I normally call, but thought of many I normally don’t think of and heard from many I normally don’t.

I now get email from people I barely know, and so have expanded the number of people in my life. So it can be said to be fuller. But something full can also be said to be cluttered. Do people need to hear about blue guys on TV? Do I need another way to get junk mail and hear urban legends? Most of the emails I get aren’t anything that can really be considered informative or important. Instead I get forwarded forwards of top ten lists, strange but true news bits and haiku. I’m under the impression that this amazing tool is not so much a tool as a toy… for grownups.