Dyslexia in a Digital World
Dyslexia is made more difficult in the digital world. I find that my tolerance level for the problems I incur daily in the world full of passwords, authorization codes, and resetting of websites has become less with each passing year. Never very tolerant of my own mistakes to begin with - (It reinforces my sense of stupidity) -and frustrated easily, I find myself cursing at my computer as once again I screwed up something in typing in a password. Three screw-ups are easy to do when all you can see for your efforts are the sequence of ******. You get locked out for security reasons, and consequently you enter digital hell, where I find myself trapped, crazed, and screaming. Computer programmers, security controllers, and normies, who have no such problems, have no sympathy or understanding of how difficult keeping up with the contemporary world is. I find myself almost daily wishing I live some place far away from this internet world where I had no phone that I must punch in numbers, no computer where I must remember the security questions or to decipher, which one of the many passwords I wrote down, crossed off, or reinstated, and no need to add or subtract anything.
I thought about this after reading the many comments I have received about my article "Crazy Making Dyslexia” - (I appear to have touched a nerve with many who experience the same problems I do,) - and after spending a whole afternoon trying to get access to my bank account after being locked out for a week, when I couldn't get the password right. I found myself enraged after yet again in a confrontation with the digital world. I contemplated heaving my computer out the door to my studio but managed to restrain myself. I knew if I did that there would be immediate satisfaction, but later regret and the humbling walk to retrieve my access to the world. My phone, however, is getting very battered after I have tossed it across the room more than once in the never ending struggled to push the right keys on the touch sensitive keyboard.
Technologists who think everything is answered by a new and better program, app, or website, don't live in the same world I do. Technology is not the answer to my problems, nor do I believe it is the answer to all problems. To me it is the enemy that creates multiple problems for every solution solved. For anyone not right-handed, dyslexic, or otherwise compromised the digital revolution comes with a heavy price tag.
I keep thinking there must be a place somewhere in the world that people do not use phones but talk to one another. Somewhere that they only read books and write notes to one another. There isn't a computer to be found. People walk to where they want to go. And if you can't handle numbers, no one thinks you odd. Nirvana me thinks! But it probably doesn't exist anymore. Even in remotest Africa and Asia they have cellphones.
