Improving life and personal connections through technology | READER COMMENTARY – Baltimore Sun

Recently, I received an email from an old friend in England. Tony wrote that his wifes 70th birthday was coming up, and he is asking their many friends to send cards to her in care of their son, so she would get them all at once at a surprise celebration. I sent a card across the Atlantic with many good wishes. And several weeks ago, I watched on YouTube a friends family celebration in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Although COVID has kept us apart physically, technology has brought us together.

And so, without sounding like Pollyanna, with war raging in Ukraine, gas prices growing and COVID not yet concluded, there are happy things happening, due to expanding technology.

For example, on Monday nights I have been teaching my Hopkins Odyssey courses on Zoom 19th century English Romantic poets right now. In the past two years, my course participants have come from Chicago, San Francisco, New York City, Florida and Connecticut. Many of my friends and I have been taking Smithsonian courses on Zoom.

On Wednesdays at noon, also on Zoom, my Bible Study meets with members from three Baltimore City churches participating. And thousands of people have been and still are working remotely, thus avoiding long commutes and, in some cases, formal dress.

Although, as an English teacher, I still prefer to read traditional paper books, I admire the Kindle description that author and former Baltimore Sun reporter Laura Lippman writes in The Book Thing: Says she, books could live inside devices, glowing like captured genies, desperate to get back out in the world and grant peoples wishes.

Speaking of granting wishes, I recently saw on the PBS NewsHour, a segment on 3D printed homes. Through technology, a home 1,500 square feet with three bedrooms, two bathrooms and a garage can be built in 24 hours, and the cost is much less than a traditional home.

This new project is projected to grow more than $1.5 billion in 2024. As a result, many low-income families who never thought they could own a home, will be able to.

The use of technology within a home is vast. When I asked Marshall, my tech-savvy cousin in North Carolina, to list the technical devices he and his wife use in their two homes, he first explained that before they drive to their second home on the water, three hours away, they can, through their phones, have the electricity turned on as well as the heat, whereas in the past, they had to ask a neighbor to do that.

To quote Marshall, between Jan and me, we have two iPhones, two Kindles, a desktop PC, Windows laptops, iPads, MacBook pro, printers, scanners, smart TV, Amazon Echos, etc.

With their phones, in addition to calling, texting, emailing and photographing, they do all their banking, all their purchasing, as well as start their cars, read books and maps, do research, and their list goes on.

Of course, every new invention is not a panacea, and peoples normal resistance to change is always a problem.

The one example that comes to mind is the invention of frozen foods. In The Magnificent Lives of Marjorie Post, writer Allison Pataki explains how resistant Marjorie Merriweather Posts second husband was as CEO of Post Cereals (women could neither hold such positions nor sit on boards in the early 1900s) when Marjorie wanted to buy Clarence Birdseyes small frozen-fish business. Fortunately for the world, Marjorie prevailed, and frozen foods, making life easier and healthier, are sold and consumed nearly everywhere in the world.

Indeed, many people still prefer to interact in person; nevertheless, using technology makes life easier and connects us in ways that never seemed possible, a definite positive among our problems today.

Lynne Agress, who teaches in the Odyssey Program of Johns Hopkins, is president of BWB-Business Writing At Its Best Inc. and author of The Feminine Irony and Working With Words in Business and Legal Writing. Her email is lynneagress@aol.com.

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Improving life and personal connections through technology | READER COMMENTARY - Baltimore Sun