lavochkin
Here’s an interesting article I read in PC World today. I think the point of the article is true–we’re moving away from having to actually write/compose anything and further in the direction of actual face-to-face interaction, albeit electronically-moderated. The funny thing about newer technologies like texting or posting on social networking sites is that in many cases, in spite of their immediacy, the goal of the user is sometimes to be more obscure. Why would anyone want that, you ask? The risk of emotional confrontation. Let’s say you’re involved in a feud with another person for whatever reason. Why send an e-mail, much less actually call, much less actually meet in person, when you can simply text them a few lines from your cell phone and feel better about the situation, regardless of whether or not anything’s actually been resolved? I’ve seen this happen many times. Our communicationis becoming less substantial as it becomes more “convenient.” If that isn’t the great irony of the technological age, I don’t know what is. Life is more convenient that it has even been in human history thanks to technologies from the refrigerator to the microwave to the internet, but our societies are more stressed, more harried, more rushed, less able to articulate coherent, rational thought, less introspective, less complete than they’ve ever been. I think that should tell us something about human nature, something that should have always been obvious except that it’s been suppressed.
On a related note, the story immediately reminded me of instant messages between my parents and myself back in college, when I used to IM all the time. My friends and I, rightly so, treated IM as a sort of conversation, sending snippets and phrases and quips back and forth, but rarely anything more than a line or two per response in those tiny IM windows. Whenever I’d have an IM conversation with either my mom or dad, though, I would say something, expecting a relatively quick response, only to get a paragraph three minutes later, complete with punctuation and capitalization. The events of that anecdote definitely anticipated what the article alludes to: The communication generation gap is growing in ways distinct from previous generations. And not in particularly positive ways, either.
Still trying to set up everything I need to run the business on the laptop. It’s a lot of stuff. Trying to find open-source alternatives to all my graphics programs has been alternately exhilarating and frustrating. That said, it is nice to feel the capability at one’s fingertips once everything is downloaded and installed. I’m not a “gadget person” at all, but even I told Diane yesterday, after finally getting web core fonts installed in Fedora, that it feels like the laptop is becoming my “Swiss army knife” of web design. So far I’ve got GIMP (Photoshop alternative), Inkscape (Illustrator alternative), Bluefish (my text editor for HTML and CSS), FileZilla (FTP client), OpenOffice (documents and administration) and I’ll need to figure out a way to emulate or at least get screenshots from other browsers. It’s been daunting, and I still need to become really fluent with the software, but I think I’m almost done and besides, it’s fun.