Wednesday, January 16, 2008 | by nathan

Into Thin Air

I’m what you might call a novice techie. I feel that I’ve run every inch of the gamut from luddite to technophile, including the high point of the swing this past summer when I briefly considered marrying my iPhone and then just carrying on a summer affair with Brian.

The other night on the way to the gym I snapped at Brian, which I felt terrible about, and which was absolutely wrong, but hear me out:

One of my major goals for this year has been to increase the flow and organization of our house, to just generally make it a more livable, vital place where we actually do the things we tell ourselves we’re going to, and we clean up once we’re finished. We have a problem with these things. To that effect, I hung one of the 100,000 reporter’s notebooks I own from the kitchen wall, and anytime we come up with something we need at the store, we write it down. We look at it every day. We add to it, and when someone goes to the store, he rips the sheet off the notebook and takes it with him.

Brian mentioned that he could easily set up something like that for us online, so if we’re at work, say, and headed to Target over lunch break - a favorite activity of his - we wouldn’t have to think to grab the sheet THAT MORNING, or otherwise try to remember what’s on it.

And I lost it, a little. Maybe it was my recent interaction with my favorite old philosophy professor, but the idea of having something as simple an innocuous as a grocery list on the internet just seemed ridiculous to me.

"I don’t want to use technology for EVERYTHING!" I shouted in the car. I shouldn’t have done that; it was uncalled-for. Things immediately got awkward.

I apologized profusely, then tried to explain myself.

I like having a physical connection with things, especially with words and things I need to remember. Physically writing things down helps me to remember them so much more than typing them or entering them in an internet form. Sometimes I log on to this very website and go, "Wait, when the hell did I write that? Did someone hack my site?" Then I see my gratuitous overuse of the caps lock key and think, oh, yeah, right.

I could never go to a class and type my notes on a laptop; this likely disqualifies me from most major moneymaking grad schools, but oh the hell well. At work people are constantly asking me, "Should I send you an Outlook invitation? Why don’t you publish your Outlook calendar? Could you just let me know through Outlook, EVEN THOUGH I’M STANDING HERE TALKING TO YOU AND YOU JUST TOLD ME?"

People! It HELPS me to write stuff down! To physically get a pen, and physically get a piece of paper, and make words, with my penmanship (which is pretty great, by the way, because I’ve spent decades perfecting it). That puts the info into my brain. Some of the people at my job - I love them - but when I tell them it’s easier for me to write it down on a post-it, they look at me like I’ve said, "You know what will help me remember that meeting next week? If I go outside and slaughter a couple of squirrels; excuse me."

The point is, there’s absolutely no reason to try to use technology for every single thing we do, and it drives me crazy that people are constantly trying to do exactly that.

Today Brian asked me what we needed at Target, and I remembered our grocery list, and rattled it off to him via iChat; in a good marriage, one person is weak where the other is strong, and we complement one another quite well.

Some people are more apt to remember things by writing them down; some people like having it on the internet where they can refer back to it at a moment’s notice; I just hope the former isn’t completely ever replaced by the latter, or else you’ll find me walking in circles in some foreign city, wondering, "How did this happen?"

So then, also, yesterday, we were introduced to the MacBook Air, a really transformative little piece of technology. I’m not going to get one; my little MacBook is more than adequate for my needs, but I thought it was interesting, the sort of vision of the future of personal computing that the MacWorld keynote showed. We’ve all known for awhile that the optical drive is on its way out, as downloads become faster, and media files rise in quality. This will mean that personal computers will get smaller and smaller, which is nice, and that they’ll have more room for hard-drive and RAM. Also nice.

My guess is in the next decade we’ll see a near-complete unification of the personal home computer and entertainment hub. Content will come largely through computers to our televisions, and will be available to transfer to our portable devices - laptops as well as iPhones, iPods, etc.

There’s something in the air, for sure, and I think yesterday’s keynote painted a clearer picture of it. I thought it was especially interesting that the Time Capsule is one of the first consumer-oriented products featuring 1 TB of storage; they just keep getting bigger, and, paradoxically, smaller. I imagine that in a year of two iPods will sync wirelessly. The real money to be made going forward is software that keeps one’s home computer/entertainment hub, laptop and mobile devices synced automatically. If you invent that, you don’t have to give me credit, but would you mind terribly to pay off my mortgage?

At any rate, it’ll be interesting to see how certain things fare going forward. I know it’s not very eco-friendly to say, but a completely paperless society is my idea of pure hell.

Mac, Interweb