El336: Sawyer

Kayla rose a good question about society's reaction to the typewriter on her presentation blog after reading about Mark Twain's experience with the new technology:

"Or maybe they didn't like how the typewriter made them feel? It turned them into a short tempered person?" -Sawyer

Technology was not integrated into their lives as it is today. Any alien object can make somebody feel uneasy--the typewriter probably made Twain feel very disconnected from his usual writing process because he was generating his thoughts into words through such a foreign object.

The unfamiliarity of the typewriter certainly had to have maid Twain's generation short-tempered. Just last week I was in tears for two hours because of technological issues. These days we depend on technology so much that we know how to fix our issues for the most part, but disruptions in normal technological functions frustrate us because they are unexpected. Our society has formed a sort of tolerance for and patience with technological issues, whereas when innovations like the typewriter were introduced the owners got rid of them after a short amount of time because they assumed they were junk. In reality they may have been using them improperly or didn't have the means to have the typewriter serviced.