In yet another attempt to stave off the anxiety and depression resulting from the recent loss of my treasured (and long abused) computer “Clicky”, (after the noise nearly all of it’s moving parts made) to severe water damage caused by a lackluster sealing job on my skylight and Monday’s rather heavy storm.
The delay in getting Clicky’s replacement; a Dell Vostro 420n Tower sporting a Core 2 Quad and several additional ‘non-Dell’ additions once it’s in my hands; has lead to some odd and annoying arrangements. I now have to be very careful about carrying around copies of all the files I could concievably need (I no longer have my FTP service, since it ran on Clicky), administering and editing my website and domain has become more difficult, and I find myself experiencing something akin to seperation anxiety or significant grief. Clicky’s loss has left me drifting and unsure of things and I find myself doing irrational displacement activities (like starting this blog or typing this on my new Das Keyboard attached to my EEE PC 901).
My real point with this is that when we anthropormorphisize computers we aren’t just excusing some percieved flaw, we are giving the computer a full personality. When we ascribe an element of sentience to these machines we give it an emotional existance, we become attached to them in ways normally limited to family pets or in some extreme cases in ways usually reserved for friends and family. On an emotional level we ‘think’ of our computers as we do our dogs or cats. When we lose our computers, it isn’t just the loss of our data or the money we will have to shell out to replace it that we feel; we experience the sorrow and greif that we did as kids when our pets died.
If that doesn’t tell you something about the human relationship to technology, I don’t know what will.
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