To help me pass the time on a plane flight the other day, I picked up a copy of PC Magazine at the airport. It was a special issue, celebrating (?) the 20th anniversary of Microsoft Windows.
I’ve been using Windows since its fairly early days. My first encounter was as a young high school teacher, given the responsibility of teaching a journalism class and having nightmares about little pieces of waxy paste-up flying around the classroom like confetti. I convinced the school administration to buy an 80286 PC, complete with Window 2.0 and a copy of PageMaker. It worked out pretty well. (I kept my sanity, anyway–at least until my run-in with the editor of the paper, who had decided that going to hear a free U2 concert in downtown San Francisco was more important than meeting her deadline. But that’s a different story…). Flipping through that copy of PC Magazine, gazing at screen shots of the Program Manager and WIN.INI and Reversi, was quite a trip down memory lane: memories of learning new tools and systems and problems, over and over again, new and different with each release, and half the time learned at about 11:00 at night with an (unavoidable) deadline bearing down on me.
In a recent post Michael Stephens mentions a provocative question posed at an Internet Librarian session: “What about librarians who are ‘tired of technology?’”
I am a tech embracer, and have been for a couple of decades. But after Windows 2.0, Windows 3.0, Windows 3.1, Windows for Workgroups, Windows 95, Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, and Windows XP (alongside DOS, MacOS, OS/2, X Windows, etc., etc.)–yeah, I’m a little tired of technology. It’s not too hard for me to understand anyone saying, “Enough already: I’ve put in my time on this stuff.”
But Michael’s interviewee, Will Richardson, offers this in response: “I would ask, ‘Are you tired of information?’”
And it occurred to me that, just last night, I had an epiphanic moment that got me excited, not about technology, but about information, all over again. I had stumbled upon the Codices Electronici Sangallenses, as yummy a collection of online medieval manuscripts as you could hope to find. These fantastically clear digital copies of 1200-year-old manuscripts, written in a beautiful Carolingian miniscule hand, are simply breathtaking. And I was struck again by the impossible wonder of the Internet and its potential to connect us all up, in any way we need it–whether it’s medieval manuscripts (one of my favorites) or the Flickr-ing of Internet Librarian. And it will just keep going and going. Wow!
So with renewed enthusiasm, or at least an only somewhat grudging acceptance, I can say: OK, Vista, bring it on. And I can say, maybe more to librarians of my-generation-plus than the fresh unflustered troops of the not-yet-tech-tired: c’mon, let’s learn it together and see what we can do.
Or maybe it’s time to start playing with Linux?
Good post, and got me thinking.
Tired of technology? That depends:
I’m tired of shiny new toys being touted as the Next Revolutionary New Thing. But I know that won’t stop.
I’m not at all tired of new tools, and sometimes (not always) the shiny new toys become tools before they become too tarnished. So I keep reading about (and sometimes thinking about and trying) the shiny new toys in the interest of finding the new tools.
“Information” doesn’t do it for me, so maybe I’m tired of information. But meaning–ways to find it, process it, amplify it–that I’m certainly not tired of.
[I stayed away from Windows until 3.0, for the reasons you stay away from most MS software until 3.0. At the time, I was using Ventura Publisher, which ran on a different graphical interface whose name I've forgotten and which was eventually buried by Windows 3 and above. Unfortunately, Ventura never really made the transition to Windows with much grace...]
I love your post, Joe. Sometimes I feel like we can fall in love with technology, and forget all about the reasons we use it in the first place. I was totally with you until you said Linux. Not that I’m anti-Linux. When I was in my library school’s required networking class we had about 2 weeks to play with a Linux operating system – all of this after weeks and weeks of Windows. Then, as part of WebJunction’s focus on Open Source awhile back, I installed Open Office. I was actually surprised how easy – and similar – it was to install, run, and learn. But … you have to admit … in the big picture, it takes a lot more time to manage/run open source software options as a “regular” user like me (somewhat techy, but not the super-techiest). At least that was my experience a few years ago. Does anyone know if there are examples of open-sourcerers who do usability testing on do-it-yourself software. Does anyone over there care about people who just want the tool to work as a means to an end, and not because they are all geeked out on the tool itself? What about people who just want to click and go? It seems to me that we need to find some way to let it be cool that not everyone is into technology, but still encourage them to use it when it makes more sense – to get something else accomplished.