The Psychology of Machines

Currently reading Mailer's A Fire on the Moon, his 1970 book on the first moon landing, and old Norman is ranting on about technology and what it does to us in the second section, in an overlong chapter entitled The Psychology of Machines. Some silliness but a lot of insights, a number of which seem appropriate to my situation as I have spent a fair chunk of the weekend wrestling with, or watching others wrestle with the technology (of the high variety, to do with communications) that surrounds me in an attempt to get onto broadband and get other machines to work that appear to have expired.

In A Fire on the Moon there's a lot about dread and, whilst I know Mailer is concerned with something a whole lot deeper, I can't help but reflect on the fact that dealing with fixing or altering any facet of the technology around me is worth dreading as it will be frustrating and time-consuming in equal proportions, as it was this weekend. The adventure is still not over, by the way, as I have several tasks to attempt to complete tomorrow. One of these involves dealing with Starhub and, based on previous attempts to get reasonable service which failed miserably, I'm not looking forward to that.

The irony is, of course, that when all this stuff works, which it does most of the time, it's so magical you come to feel you can't do without it