Where is the Undo Button?

As someone that is frequently editing and creating various projects on a computer, I have become committed to the presence of the "Edit--> Undo" button. Undoubtedly, many of us have had the experience of editing some photo or text and making an accidental or intended change that leaves the image or composition slightly askew or more considerably, a disaster. But stop the heart attack, because a simple flick of the mouse to the edit menu and the "undo" selection restores everything to its previous bliss and harmony.

So when I was recently discovering my inner handyman at home by putting up some window blinds, I found my self at a loss when I unfortunately snapped off the head of a screw midway through screwing it into the window frame. With no way to remove the screw or continue screwing it into the wood, and already committed to placing the window blind in that precise position, I looked for the "Edit-->Undo" button, but as anyone could expect, it was nowhere to be found. I don't mean to say I wished that there was an "Edit-undo" button, although I did, but rather, more significantly, I expected there to be an "Edit-->Undo" button on some level of my being. At that moment I realized how much a product of the digital age I have become.

So many of my digital projects occur inside a programming artifice that includes fail safes like the "Edit-->Undo" function that allow me to make mistakes and return to a prior state in its exact representation without any difficulty, but daily offline, physical existence offers me no such fail safes. In a profound way, offline, physical existence requires a degree of commitment that is not required in the digital world.  My offline, physical projects occur inside a stream of time that is always moving forward, and as such I can never return to a previous state. In the digital world, though, time is malleable, and clever programming allows a computer user to move between past and present within the timeline of a project with relative ease.

I am not here trying to make a value judgment about one type of existence versus another (digital versus physical), but rather I am expressing the struggle that results from growing up and living in a world that offers us both types of existence.  While our culture is rife with metaphors that play on the analogy between digital/technological existence and physical existence (i.e. "the human brain is a computer,"  "I'll scan over that," "you're like a broken record") there is also a disconnect that occurs between living digitally and living physically. In the rupture between online and offline existence, we are faced with the tremendous task of discovering what it means to be human in this world that offers us remarkably diverse ways of acting and living. What follows in this blog are my musings about the conflicts and struggles that arise between the different modes of existing (digital/technological and offline/physical). In this way, I hope to shed light on the deeper nature of our human endeavors.