A couple of weeks ago, Nora received a facebook message from Mike Partridge in Saint John, New Brunswick. Mike wanted to let us know how technology has changed his life. Mike was deaf, but two years ago, he got a cochlear implant, and now he can hear again.
A cochlear implant is a bionic technology. Mike is the Bionic Man! (by the way, the new Bionic Woman TV show debuts on NBC next week…)
Here is a working version of our interview with Mike. We still need to add music, and tighten it up a little, but we thought we’d post it here first to solicit comments.
Do you have a personal story about using technology to improve your body’s function? Laser-eye surgery, or maybe a hip replacement? Tell us how it changed the way you live.
Nora, it was a great pleasure to chat with you about my “Cochlear Implant” and how this amazing technology has improved my life. I hope if any listeners are interested in more information they will look me up on Face Book, I will be more than happy to help them learn about Cochlear Implants.
Mike “Ears Hopin” Partridge
Because I’m a blind guy, I use a voice synthesizer program in my computer, a thing called jaws, which reads everything aloud to me –word processing, emails, web sites, tea leaves, whatever. I teach at a college when I’m not writing books, and since I can’t read printed pages or handwriting, my students submit their essays on disk or via email. I open their files in Microsoft Word, listen to them with my voice synthesizer, and type in my commentary as I go. Works well. Except for one hitch. After the first couple of semesters I noticed that my marking was getting more and more angry, or clipped, or crusty. Let’s just say unpleasant, and I didn’t like it. But it was coming reflexively, it was just the way I was reacting. Yoga didn’t help. Neither did better booze. That’s when I figured out I was having a technological problem, not a pedagogical issue or a spiritual malaise. What had happened was I’d been listening to the same computer voice for eight courses now, and so in my mind, I was hearing this same, singular student over and over again, one who happened to be making the same mistakes repeatedly. Although I’d actually been reading works by hundreds of students, my computer voice was leading me to feel I had only one pupil, and a very thick-headed one at that, who wasn’t learning anything. Now I change the voice slightly before each semester begins, perhaps a nudge in the pitch, or a bit more speed. It doesn’t take much, but the effect is that I start each course with a refreshed imagination that the faces I don’t see in front of me are new ones, even if the voice I’ll hear their essays in is only another slight variation of Stephen hawking’s.
Then, perhaps when the marking is done, I might type a few sentences into my word processor about bare chested pirates and busty, sea-fairing maidens, something like that, , just to hear what it would be like to have Stephen hawking read me an erotic potboiler.