I used to hate technology. The pandemic helped me see its good side.

I never cared about the latest technology. I was always comfortably, even enthusiastically, behind the times; I trusted that if I just kept the stuff I had, popular opinion would come around again (as I type, I am listening to a vinyl record on my turntable, while wearing my old Velcro sneaks). But over the past five years, my general suspicion of "progress" has metastasized, growing into a full-blown, reactionary, Luddite hatred for anything newfangled — which is to say, anything that didn't exist in 1992, my senior year in high school, when civilization peaked.

Over the years, it has been painful to be proven so right about technology's potential to make things worse. I watched as smartphones stole parents' attention from children; as the internet brought office work into our bedrooms; as social media became platforms for misogyny and other abuse, as well as the dissemination of dark-money political propaganda. And I looked around and thought, "What was so bad about the age of landlines? Where's Ally Sheedy? Please pass the Clearly Canadian." I got rid of my iPhone 5 only last month, after my son dropped it facedown, shattering its screen. (Hello, iPhone 7!)

So if you had asked me three months ago whether a worldwide pandemic might get me to admit that the internet has, on balance, been good for humanity, I would not have said yes. I probably would have mumbled something about how Morse code and oxen got everyone through the pandemic of 1918.

But here we are: Friends of mine are sick, hospitals are running short on ventilators and college teachers (like me) will never see our seniors again. I have had to impress on my 6-year-old daughter, the extrovert's extrovert, that she can no longer hug neighbors on the sidewalk. (She doesn't understand why.) My parents live only 70 miles away, but it seems that they will go months without seeing their grandchildren.

And in all of this, the internet is a comfort.

My children can get on FaceTime with Grandma and Grandpa. For Passover, they will be able to look at their cousins' faces on Zoom's "gallery view" — the perfect opportunity to teach children about "The Brady Bunch" — as we sing "Dayenu" and "Chad Gadya." My son's 18-month checkup was conducted via computer, and it was reassuring for us to see the pediatrician's face, even if she couldn't prod our boy as usual. We can order food online, keeping our local restaurants in business, and a new bookstore in town is delivering Web-based orders by bicycle.

Then there are the many uses of the internet, some of them lifesaving, that I will never see directly. I have no idea how technology is lubricating the supply chain for food and medicine, but I am sure that it is. As our hospitals get overloaded, telemedicine is an essential option for the diagnoses and even treatment of non-covid-19 ailments.

There are people whose ongoing employment is facilitated by the Web, people who, if limited to the telephones and the mail, would get laid off or paid fewer hours. My wife does legal work for death-row inmates. When she files their appeals, time is of the essence; the ability to read documents as PDF scans, from courthouses around the country, makes her work possible, even if she can no longer see her colleagues.

So, yes, I am shouting a little more quietly about the evils of technology right now. I am aware of the lives saved, the loneliness attenuated, the work getting done. And the socializing! I don't begrudge anyone their "quarantini" video chat cocktail hours — always better to see the other glasses being raised. For my poker game last week, six chums and I paired a Zoom conference with an app on our phones that brought us together around a common table. It was harder to see Bontly's eye twitch (in person, a clear tell), but we had a grand old time.

And yet, curmudgeon that I am, I believe that some of the old caveats still apply. My own experience of homeboundedness has been a terrific reminder of the analog pleasures. As nice as it is for my children to see their grandparents' pixelated faces, what they really enjoy is getting letters from Grandma in the mail (which is coming every day, on time). I am glad my new phone has a spiffy app to read classic books in the public domain; that's one fewer excuse not to attempt "Jane Eyre" again. But I have also been pulling old favorites off my shelves, getting the surprise of seeing yesteryear's marginal notes and underlining. And I have been sharing books with neighbors. We leave stuff on the porch, and wave through the window.

And that poker? If I didn't have the app, perhaps I'd go back to correspondence chess. Or just force my 13- and 11-year-old daughters to get better at cards. Right now, having been taught that lying is wrong, they have trouble bluffing. But give us four more weeks of captivity, and they won't need an allowance anymore.

As for the writing class I teach, yes, email and Google Docs make things easier. But if my teaching assistants and I had to listen to students read their work aloud on the phone instead — or send it via the Postal Service — that would bring its own pleasures. The teacher/pupil relationship would have a different rhythm. It would be strange at first, and then it would be normal, even nice. And I don't know that anybody would learn any less.

They might even learn more. The truth is, most of the time, technology just gets stuff done faster. Faster is better when we are talking about medical treatment or fire alarms. Faster is better when gathering epidemiological data. But for most of life, there is no rush. The main difference with my iPhone 7 is the faster processor. But I didn't really need any more speed. And if I'm going to read "Jane Eyre," I'm sure one of my neighbors has it. Or that bookseller, with her bicycle.

Oppenheimer is the host of the podcast Unorthodox and is writing a book about the Tree of Life shooting in Pittsburgh. This piece was written for The Washington Post.