“OU professor: Heck no to techno”

OU professor: Heck no to techno

Posted: 27 Dec 2010 10:15 AM PST

BY DAVID ZIZZO dzizzo@opubco.com Oklahoman Comment on this article

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"I embrace the forms of technology I find useful," Savage explains.

That includes a few "gizmos," as he calls most devices that are more contemporary than the pencil and legal pad he has used to compose 11 books and countless journal articles over his decades in academia. For instance, since he likes movies, Savage has a VCR and two DVD players he uses with his cathode ray tube TV sets, provided they have "enough holes" to accept the wires those devices require.

In today's light-speed wireless, electronic, digital technocracy, where most people are consumed by a 24-7 matrix of smart phones, social media and texting, Savage ambles along with "snail mail," landline phones and books printed on that flat material that appears from laser printers.

The "troglodyte." That's what Savage, who won't reveal his age other than to say he is a "pre-Boomer," has been called, he said. "Mostly it's 'fossil,' 'geezer,' 'coot.' My colleagues frequently refer to me as a Luddite."

Savage, who tries to have a cigar in his hand whenever he has a photo taken "because it's offensive," doesn't care for e-books, cell phones jabber in the checkout line and people who e-mail co-workers at the next desk. And don't get him started on Boolean logic.

To explain his opposition to what others might call progress, Savage turns to his expertise in Oklahoma history. When farmers needed fences on the Great Plains, he said, there wasn't enough timber to build them with split wooden rails as farmers in the forested East did. Barbed wire solved that problem. When farmers on the arid prairies needed water, the windmill pump was invented.

The point is that the Industrial Revolution solved existing problems, Savage said. These days, he said, countless electronic whatnots solve problems that don't exist and fill needs we don't have, at least until marketers convince us we do.

"An awful lot of the stuff made available and marketed to people is nonessential."

The result, he said, is a din of self-expression a thousand miles wide and a quarter-inch deep. "Nobody thinks about much anymore," he said. "They're too busy talking."

Savage's wife of 27 years, Sheila Bobalik Savage, loves her trog, even though his approach is "irksome sometimes."

"He's dependent on other people," she said, explaining how her husband gets by. Secretaries in the history department print out important e-mails intended for him, for instance.

When Savage wants to see his payroll records (OU has gone paperless), a secretary turns her head to allow him to "hunt and peck" his password into her computer, he said, then she prints out his statement. He makes most purchases by scribbling on rectangular paper things, you know, checks. He pays bills by using envelopes with those sticky things outside, you know, stamps.

Sheila Savage, an archaeologist who uses a cordless phone at home, carries a cell phone and uses a computer, sees her husband's point on some things. She agrees with him that the best writing — and thinking — involve cursive longhand and paper. Constant connectedness can have its drawbacks, she agrees.

"We tend to think every thought we have is critical," she said.

And that anything new is good, from pricey cars and easy debt to creative mortgages and credit default swaps. "It's a good thing in many ways," she said of her husband's resistance to change.

The couple's son, William Savage III, "Tres," as he's known, is a typical 26-year-old — immersed in electronica. "We're at the forefront of a revolution," he explained over his smart phone while vacationing in California wine country. Tres (pronounced "Trace") said he has tried to lure his father to the digital side without much success. But his father's approach seems to have made him a better professor, he said, since Savage requires his students to visit real libraries for research in real books and he doesn't use PowerPoint presentations.

"I personally hate PowerPoint," Tres said. "I thought PowerPoint was the crutch of a person who doesn't know how to teach."

Tres said he doesn't agree with his father's heck-no-to-techno attitude. "But I can completely understand it."

Tres and his friend imagine 30 years from now they might be the guys refusing to change.

"We're going to resist the urge to implant the transmitters in our brains and touch our foreheads to telecommunicate," he said. "We're going to be sitting here using Google Chat, and we're going to be the Luddites."

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Monday, December 27, 2010