Technophobes last acceptable group for vilification …

I’ll concede this is technically a bit off topic in terms of sports cards and memorabilia, but the onerous nature of technological advances over the last 25 years touches virtually every aspect of our daily lives ... and it ain’t always pretty.

People who are resistant to all the technology – or more mildly, slow to embrace it – are vilified as either ignorant, dim-witted or just plain prehistoric. Nowhere is there even the slightest suggestion that reluctance to jump headlong onto the bandwagon could conceivably have roots in legitimate arguments about the need, utility or even usefulness of whatever the latest innovation might be.

There are literally millions of people who avoid the Internet or even use of a home computer like the plague, and it says here that part of their abstention stems from the fact that computers themselves are designed for the glee and absorption of the most-computer literate rather than allow for some tentative accommodation to the people who just can’t seem to get the hang of it all.

We – if it weren’t obvious, I am a suitably enraged technophobe – get treated like petulant children because we don’t “get” all the little symbols and arcane directions associated with computer use. Almost everything that gets lumped under the new technology banner winds up being infinitely more complex than it has to be, the directions are agonizingly complicated and confusing and the array of options and features goes way beyond what the casual user might regard as necessary.

Someday, there’s going to be a backlash – and the marginally older crowd is going to at the forefront, loudly proclaiming that the next cellphone doesn’t need to be the size of a postage stamp, or the instructions for a computer program to allow the organization of treasured family photos doesn’t need to be the size of the Manhattan phone book.

I suppose this all started many eons ago, but some of the innovations in recent decades have been equal parts annoying and superfluous. We probably let it all get away from us when we allowed businesses to send us into computer hell with recorded answering systems that let you talk for interminable periods to a synthesized computer “voice” that effectively keeps you at bay from ever talking to a human being.

Press “2” on your computer if you think I’m just another lollygagging neo-Luddite old dog unwilling to learn new tricks.