Skip to main content

Decidedly Low Tech

According to an article in the USA Today that came out last week, Joan Brady is one of the last people in San Francisco without email. A personal chef by day and party clown by night, Joan says, "I just don't need it." Perhaps a bit extreme, but she fits within a category of the population that the Pew Internet & American Life Project calls a "tech-no" - not exactly doomsday-sayers on technology but conscientious objectors to the encroachment of technology. PDAs, tablet PCs, media servers, portable media devices - the others can have them. Because the tech-nos have uncluttered lives, a lot of disconnected time, and peace of mind.

A good reflection for someone who works in high technology to think about the tech-nos and their choices in the modern lifestyle. What causes people to choose different options to live their life in their daily customs and communication patterns? How do people interact with each other? What is the daily routine that defines the rhythm of life? And how do people change and evolve their living patterns with the passing of time and the advance of modernity? There are an almost-infinite number of choices that a person can make - and decidedly low tech is one of those options.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Little Bit of Proust

Somehow I started to read Proust. The blame goes to Alain de Botton , a writer whose witticisms deconstruct modern thinking and make intellectualism seem but a trifle and a whim. He wrote a book in 1997 called "How Proust Can Change Your Life" which distills the enigmatic French novelist into a self-help dispenser of pithy ideas. How clever I found Mr. de Botton to be when I dipped my toe into the vagaries of Proust; I picked up volume one of "In Search of Lost Time" and instantly fell into the deep end. What author dares to run sentences onward into the stratosphere that sometimes seemingly mellows behind the stars of a bright night, but never so much as an introspective person that wretches for the meaning of a simple thought, sometimes stumbling, but always emerging strongly as that same night in starry sky, almost an homage back to Van Gogh, whose rich paintings greatly represented the mood of a generation - and generations often afford a few mis-steps in l...
2 comments
Read more

Try Something New: 750 Words

If there is anything universally redeeming about writing, it is the ability to delve into the inner thoughts of one's own psyche and come back with perspective on feelings, motivations, and desires. In this way, journaling as the specific form of writing that provides this redemption can be a worthwhile pursuit. One might suppose that the internet world would offer various tools to make journaling simple, easy, and relatively painless, but that has not always been the case - until now. I came across this from Lifehacker, who was promoting the site back in March: 750words. The site is run by a former Amazon product manager who has an interest in journaling for the creative process and data visualization. Mash those things together, and you have an interesting site that is built around the premise that creative juices get flowing by consistently writing 3 pages worth of stuff on a daily basis, which translates to roughly 750 words. Logging in by using your Google or Facebook use...
2 comments
Read more

Netscape, We Hardly Knew Ye...

In 1995, I started using email. In my first college days, my friend Virge anointed me with a playful email handle - toddity. She never told me that your email address was somewhat permanent, and I spent the rest of my university days with an username that amused most who got a message from good, old Eudora. At that time, I used Netscape as my web browser. Fast forward almost 15 years. I moved on first to Internet Explorer (Microsoft had a monopolistic hand in it), and then to Firefox from which I am penning this blog entry. Somewhere along the way, Netscape was acquired by AOL and sent down the river on a slow obsolescence. Until next week, when Netscape will end up on the scrap heap with Prodigy, Compuserve, and Excite@Home. How much the internet has changed. I can wax poetically on blogs and social networks, but I can also remember messageboards, usenets, IM, forums, web 1.0, HTML, and the world wide web when www. was a foreign concept. The concept is still the same - connec...
2 comments
Read more