The past is a foreign country
November 28, 2021 7:11 AM Subscribe
The Technological Parentheses of Our Lives - "There are a lot of potential parentheses to speculate about, from the end of fossil fuels or eating meat as a society, to the end of screens due to augmented reality..."
-Thanksgiving menu at Plaza Hotel NYC, 1899
-The abolitionist history of Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie — and why the South resisted both: "the pumpkin was a symbol of the Northern anti-slavery movement."
...here’s the thing: the very failure to anticipate the endpoints of these parentheses means that we are certainly living in many of these right now and are simply ignorant of them. Yes, driving gets the headlines, but there are no doubt so many more of these parentheses that surround us, but to which we are blind. What would these look like, these everyday technologies that we take for granted but may one day vanish? Well, they would have to be part of the fabric of our technological lives, so embedded that they could be used in the plots of our sitcoms, yet might be as puzzling to those in the future as the finer points of telephone answering machines in episodes of Seinfeld are to today’s youth.also btw...
-Thanksgiving menu at Plaza Hotel NYC, 1899
-The abolitionist history of Thanksgiving and pumpkin pie — and why the South resisted both: "the pumpkin was a symbol of the Northern anti-slavery movement."
These larger technological changes almost swamp our ability to even fathom a period beforehand. As someone from the so-called Oregon Trail Generation, I can remember times before widespread Internet access, how I used the library and its card catalog, navigated our telephone books, and even called a particular telephone number to receive the exact time of day when I needed to reset our clocks after a power outage. But I also can't.
This is a great paragraph. A few months ago, I found myself unable to remember how I made reservations at a campground in Maryland for the 1987 March on Washington for Gay & Lesbian Rights. After much brow-furrowing and casting my mind into the past, I remembered campground directories, and making phone calls.
posted by Orlop at 8:25 AM on November 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
This is a great paragraph. A few months ago, I found myself unable to remember how I made reservations at a campground in Maryland for the 1987 March on Washington for Gay & Lesbian Rights. After much brow-furrowing and casting my mind into the past, I remembered campground directories, and making phone calls.
posted by Orlop at 8:25 AM on November 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
Orlop - I remember both ink wells and party lines. When I was quite young (early-mid 1960s), my dad's entire small town operated on them. And then we moved into a new suburban home in 1969 and had to share one with the house next door for a few months until the phone company got around to sorting things out. I distinctly remember catching serious shit for eavesdropping on the neighbours' line.
I was also struck by this:
As someone from the so-called Oregon Trail Generation, I can remember times before widespread Internet access,
A. it's the first time I've heard the term "Oregon Trail Generation"
B. I not only remember the times before widespread internet access, I was closer to forty than thirty before this really happened in my neck of the woods (got my first email address at age 38, in 1998, ended up working in the IT field within a year -- but that's another story).
My point being -- I'm pretty sure I'm older than Samuel Arbesman, probably by at least a decade. I wonder if he remembers a time before ubiquitous cable TV, the many channelled universe -- I was at least ten before we had that in the house, getting by on three and a half channels, and then the family's first colour TV showed up when I was eleven. I was shocked. I thought only rich people could afford those.
So anyway, yes, I've known more parentheses than Arbesman has and though I appreciate his insights, I guess I'm missing a certain "wow" factor. I suppose because I've already been there. Maybe it's just the various paths I've chosen over the years, but I would've gone postal (or certainly Unabomber) decades ago if I hadn't rather consciously signed on with the TOTAL CHANGE paradigm. Which leads to two notes:
A. my mom (who didn't even have radio when she was a small child living in a remote rural location) once said (in not so many words) that change is inevitable; the question is, do you wait for the change to make you, or do you make the change? Clearly, she believed it was wise to to do the latter.
B. not for the first time, I feel compelled to recommend this fifty-six year old artifact: This Is Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage (1967). It says more about the reality of the CHANGE we're all dancing with right now than any other fifty-one minute engagement I'm aware of.
We're in it -- whatever it is.
posted by philip-random at 8:33 AM on November 28, 2021 [11 favorites]
I was also struck by this:
As someone from the so-called Oregon Trail Generation, I can remember times before widespread Internet access,
A. it's the first time I've heard the term "Oregon Trail Generation"
B. I not only remember the times before widespread internet access, I was closer to forty than thirty before this really happened in my neck of the woods (got my first email address at age 38, in 1998, ended up working in the IT field within a year -- but that's another story).
My point being -- I'm pretty sure I'm older than Samuel Arbesman, probably by at least a decade. I wonder if he remembers a time before ubiquitous cable TV, the many channelled universe -- I was at least ten before we had that in the house, getting by on three and a half channels, and then the family's first colour TV showed up when I was eleven. I was shocked. I thought only rich people could afford those.
So anyway, yes, I've known more parentheses than Arbesman has and though I appreciate his insights, I guess I'm missing a certain "wow" factor. I suppose because I've already been there. Maybe it's just the various paths I've chosen over the years, but I would've gone postal (or certainly Unabomber) decades ago if I hadn't rather consciously signed on with the TOTAL CHANGE paradigm. Which leads to two notes:
A. my mom (who didn't even have radio when she was a small child living in a remote rural location) once said (in not so many words) that change is inevitable; the question is, do you wait for the change to make you, or do you make the change? Clearly, she believed it was wise to to do the latter.
B. not for the first time, I feel compelled to recommend this fifty-six year old artifact: This Is Marshall McLuhan - The Medium Is The Massage (1967). It says more about the reality of the CHANGE we're all dancing with right now than any other fifty-one minute engagement I'm aware of.
We're in it -- whatever it is.
posted by philip-random at 8:33 AM on November 28, 2021 [11 favorites]
Yeah, as someone probably a couple years younger than the person who wrote the article, what really rustles my jimmies is not the obsolescence but the forgetting. It's so weird to not remember how I used to do a thing before the internet. I have kids now and their logistical challenges are so often answered by tech that's come into being in the last couple decades, and it's often genuinely difficult to recall what we did without it.
Like, god, if you left your textbook at school but needed it for homework? I had exactly one friend in middle school who owned a flatbed scanner and I just had to hope she had her book so she could scan the page and then fax me the scan. But what did kids do before that? I didn't always have a fax machine. Did we just not do the assignment? Maybe my parents drove me to a friend's house to borrow the book?
posted by potrzebie at 8:38 AM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Like, god, if you left your textbook at school but needed it for homework? I had exactly one friend in middle school who owned a flatbed scanner and I just had to hope she had her book so she could scan the page and then fax me the scan. But what did kids do before that? I didn't always have a fax machine. Did we just not do the assignment? Maybe my parents drove me to a friend's house to borrow the book?
posted by potrzebie at 8:38 AM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Fax machines are a weird one for me. I've a. never owned one, and b. probably sent less than a dozen faxes in my life. It's a technology I've managed to almost entirely skip.
posted by philip-random at 8:45 AM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by philip-random at 8:45 AM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
My dad and I have discussed this idea shorty after he’d gotten an iPad. We were putting something in the fridge when he paused and told me every week his family would pick up a block of ice for their icebox. Since the ropes weren’t 100% secure he would sit on the bumper of their car holding it steady while they drove it slowly home.
I’m thinking of sending this article to him. Just have to decide the avenue. A pdf over email? He says his inbox is overwhelmed by pornographic spam. Send him a link over text? Tell him over a FaceTime call? Print it and send by snail mail? The last seems as clumsy as solution as letting a child ride on a bumper, but is the most likely to work.
posted by Phyllis keeps a tight rein at 9:19 AM on November 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
I’m thinking of sending this article to him. Just have to decide the avenue. A pdf over email? He says his inbox is overwhelmed by pornographic spam. Send him a link over text? Tell him over a FaceTime call? Print it and send by snail mail? The last seems as clumsy as solution as letting a child ride on a bumper, but is the most likely to work.
posted by Phyllis keeps a tight rein at 9:19 AM on November 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
Potrzebie, you would call your friend and have them tell you what the book said. And write it down with pen and paper. And then go do your assignment the same way. Or yeah if it was really large (unusual for an overnight assignment) one of you would visit the other.
I kind of miss remembering phone numbers. I hate being so helpless without my personal phone.
posted by emjaybee at 9:22 AM on November 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
I kind of miss remembering phone numbers. I hate being so helpless without my personal phone.
posted by emjaybee at 9:22 AM on November 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
- Paternal grandmother had pulse dialing up to the mid-2000s or so
- We have a number of Coax cable outlets in our condo back from when the association had a deal with the major carrier to incorporate it into the dues. Now just one serves a modem for internet
- I have a collection of old audio players next to my desk at work, full-stack: turntable, 5 CD player (doesn't work great for random, but it's alright), and dual-cassette (only the B-player works). If I have a moment, I'll play.
- In my work basement office, I have an old typewriter desk on wheels with two flip out sides for additional workspace. Got it at an estate sale, and in its drawer there were spare keys and other typewriter objects
Great article, great thread.
posted by JoeXIII007 at 9:38 AM on November 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
AT&T batted 1000 with their 1993 ads I guess . . . portable health records are still iffy but we're trying . . . [previously]
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:41 AM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:41 AM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
I am slightly annoyed that I had to click through three links to discover in what sense the author was using "parentheses". Like a game of telephone, the meaning seems to have shifted ever so slightly in each re-use, however.
posted by eviemath at 10:00 AM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by eviemath at 10:00 AM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
Also, this:
We see this a lot in students' retention, or lack thereof, of skills and knowledge from one mathematics course to the next in a sequence of courses, for example. The students who, through our efforts as instructors or through their own background or through sheer luck, have managed to overcome the cultural stereotype of math as just a large collection of unrelated facts to memorize, and something that you can't ask "why" about, and who have been able to create in their own minds a whole concept map of how the course material is related are the ones who remember much more in subsequent courses.
posted by eviemath at 10:09 AM on November 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
Even though we intuitively know that technology is always changing, we still think of individual skills necessitated by categories of technologies as long-lasting or ever-present.That right there is reflective of the attitude that led to so many high school computer classes teaching people specific keystrokes in specific programs, rather than more generally what a word processor is and how it works, or what a spreadsheet is and how it works. This is not how all of us think about the individual skills in question, though it is quite common for sure. I submit, however, that this more restricted viewpoint is likely part of why the author has forgotten eg. details of using a card catalog - possibly he was never taught (or never sought out) the underlying organizational principles, so has no mental structure to help himself recreate smaller, missing details.
We see this a lot in students' retention, or lack thereof, of skills and knowledge from one mathematics course to the next in a sequence of courses, for example. The students who, through our efforts as instructors or through their own background or through sheer luck, have managed to overcome the cultural stereotype of math as just a large collection of unrelated facts to memorize, and something that you can't ask "why" about, and who have been able to create in their own minds a whole concept map of how the course material is related are the ones who remember much more in subsequent courses.
posted by eviemath at 10:09 AM on November 28, 2021 [9 favorites]
(One could also argue that many of the technological skills the author talks about actually involve a series of parenthetical periods, not just occupying a single set of parentheses each. Eg. Once again millions of Canadians literally forget how to drive after first snowfall (The Beaverton; satire))
posted by eviemath at 10:14 AM on November 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by eviemath at 10:14 AM on November 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
Incidentally, "ink wells and party lines" is my new sockpuppet name.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:17 AM on November 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:17 AM on November 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
I find his optimism about self-driving cars quaint.
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 10:29 AM on November 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
posted by computech_apolloniajames at 10:29 AM on November 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
I had a conversation with my grandmother when I was a young man in the mid-80's where she started talking about all the things she had seen in her life. She was born before WWI in a very rural part of Tennessee, to still very much a 19th-century agrarian lifestyle - no running water, electricity, or machinery. Just a partial list of things she was introduced to during her life (note: not necessarily the invention thereof, just when it trickled down to where rural folks would see it happen):
- plumbing
- electricity
- internal-combustion engine
- telephone
- automobile
- electric kitchen/laundry appliances
- radio
- airplanes
- television
- space flight
- personal computer
(those last two were pretty near the end of her life) Even as a partial list, that's an amazing amount of technological progress in one person's lifetime. It made me wonder what new technology would occur during my own life. So far it's been quite a list, although not as profound a change as what my grandmother witnessed.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:33 AM on November 28, 2021 [13 favorites]
- plumbing
- electricity
- internal-combustion engine
- telephone
- automobile
- electric kitchen/laundry appliances
- radio
- airplanes
- television
- space flight
- personal computer
(those last two were pretty near the end of her life) Even as a partial list, that's an amazing amount of technological progress in one person's lifetime. It made me wonder what new technology would occur during my own life. So far it's been quite a list, although not as profound a change as what my grandmother witnessed.
posted by Greg_Ace at 10:33 AM on November 28, 2021 [13 favorites]
I dated a fella with a Laserdisc player. (Also an Atari Jaguar!)
I found this article mildly terrifying. I am 52, great with a computer but kind of suck at my phone. I’ve gotten a bit better out of necessity, begrudgingly. I do not believe this attitude has or will serve me well so I should fix that.
I probably won’t live to see the demise of the iPhone but maybe? Implants? I don’t want implants.
posted by Glinn at 10:42 AM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
I found this article mildly terrifying. I am 52, great with a computer but kind of suck at my phone. I’ve gotten a bit better out of necessity, begrudgingly. I do not believe this attitude has or will serve me well so I should fix that.
I probably won’t live to see the demise of the iPhone but maybe? Implants? I don’t want implants.
posted by Glinn at 10:42 AM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
God, I hope I don't forget how to operate a shower due to the technological innovation of "Climate Catastrophe wrecking potable water supplies so you gotta stand in line at the ravine for a 1-minute-max rinse."
posted by Philipschall at 10:43 AM on November 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by Philipschall at 10:43 AM on November 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
That right there is reflective of the attitude that led to so many high school computer classes teaching people specific keystrokes in specific programs, rather than more generally what a word processor is and how it works, or what a spreadsheet is and how it works.
The reason so many high school classes were/are so specific to a given program has a lot more to do with the pressures put on public schooling by the business sector to be job training schools. Businesses have a need for people who know Word or Excel? Guess what high school computer classes teach?
A couple of weeks ago, when Comcast had that big nation-wide outage, I called their customer support number and got a for-realz busy signal. It was actually kind of nostalgic, while at the same time illustrative of how serious the problem must be if their support number has been flooded enough to skip the "please hold" and devolve to a busy signal.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:51 AM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
The reason so many high school classes were/are so specific to a given program has a lot more to do with the pressures put on public schooling by the business sector to be job training schools. Businesses have a need for people who know Word or Excel? Guess what high school computer classes teach?
A couple of weeks ago, when Comcast had that big nation-wide outage, I called their customer support number and got a for-realz busy signal. It was actually kind of nostalgic, while at the same time illustrative of how serious the problem must be if their support number has been flooded enough to skip the "please hold" and devolve to a busy signal.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:51 AM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
The techniques associated with obsolete technology don't necessarily disappear. They become the realm of specialists. People still ride horses. Perhaps there are some techniques surrounding good horsemanship—keeping your horse healthy, maintaining tack—that have been forgotten or are known only to a few. Cursive writing is going away, but historians will still read it, and calligraphers will still write it. Even if self-driving cars become perfectly reliable and widespread, there will be a few driving enthusiasts, perhaps relegated to a few restricted roads.
posted by adamrice at 11:23 AM on November 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
posted by adamrice at 11:23 AM on November 28, 2021 [6 favorites]
It is easier, I think, to anticipate that new technologies will be added in our remaining lifetimes, but hard to imagine any specific thing disappearing. Like, I would never have expected the demise of local newspapers and their classified ads, but it has effectively happened. I had a landline phone for many years before accepting that it just wasn't something I would ever use or find useful. I had one because I just assumed that a house needed a phone, like it had when I was growing up, but it was in practice obsolete for me in my entire adulthood.
posted by plonkee at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2021
posted by plonkee at 11:42 AM on November 28, 2021
Lately and every so often I have a moment where I reflect on technology, and for some reason it usually happens when I'm picking up and carrying both my modest budget smartphone and laptop and I realize I'm carrying around several billions of transistors in the form of a pair of rather ubiquitous, utilitarian slabs of plastic and glass and I just stop and think "WTF?" and feel a weird mix of cool and old.
My laptop is about a year old now, maybe two years old from initial release date and it wasn't even that expensive, but it has a gorgeous HD touchscreen display and a digital pen, and the screen can fold back into tablet mode and so on. The laptop is well under an inch thick when closed, gets like 6-9 hours of battery life and it might even weigh less than the original Macbook Air.
The phone is what is now a basic smartphone but it already has a fingerprint reader that works, dual cameras on the back and an HD camera on the front and is just about as thin and light as anything out there, all with a screen width that I would have called a "phablet" what seems like a few years ago.
Heck, my phone has all kinds of cool, weird gesture controls like being able to shake it to turn the flashlight on and off, or flipping it face down to activate a "do not disturb" mode and more.
And here I am sitting on my patio under an umbrella in the rain for the past four hours or so and I'm using my phone's hotspot because I'm lazy and the house WiFi sucks out here especially when it's raining like this, and it's all been on batteries and I just don't care.. like the phone has *checks* oh 26 hours of battery left even though it's using the hotspot and I haven't plugged it in to charge it in like over 24 hours, and the laptop still has 5+ hours of battery left and there's basically zero worry or stress about it running out.
Like, late 1990s and early 2000s me would freak the fuck out seeing this stuff that makes the tablets and computers in Star Trek: TNG look clunky and old but here I am just using it to casually browse the news, do some doomscrolling and maybe watch some silly cat videos.
Oh, hey, my friend just messaged me. From the countryside in Northern India where they're on an emergency trip to help their friend with a death in the family. Somehow the message and pic they sent got all the way here hassle free with nothing more than a wifi connection in their hotel, and since I'm on my phone's hotspot and running on batteries I could be just about anywhere with a 4G connection. Cool, cool.
Very early 2000s me remembers paying something like $250 for a Palm Pilot that had no network connections at all, which is about 400-450 today. My current phone cost like, oh, $110 with shipping. That Palm Pilot had 8 megabytes of storage, this phone has 32GB, so about 4,000 times the storage space, and this doesn't include the 128gb SD card in there. And here I am using google as a calculator over a 4G hotspot connection "wasting" some data packets just because it was slightly less keystrokes than opening the calculator app on my laptop.
Yeah, younger past me would totally freak the fuck out if they saw my current laptop and phone, and then they'd freak the fuck out again about the fact that I found it to be so, so boring and normal. Especially considering how boring and normal these devices are today and that they weren't even close to the cutting, bleeding edge of personal electronics.
They'd also probably be upset about how much other electronics these devices have replaced, like the fact I don't really have any use for a dedicated MP3 player any more, or a GPS, or that I don't carry my good camera around nearly as much as I could or should. Or that my laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port, an optical drive, or even a mechanical HDD and it's all just chips, now, though younger me would be really into SSDs and how fast my computer can boot.
Shoot, they'd also probably be upset that I actually like my touchscreen laptop and I that I actually use it. That I find it handy to be able to just touch the screen directly to manipulate my desktop and windows. It seems like just a few years ago that I was saying I hated touch screen laptops or the very act of touching a screen at all.
And all of this being said the thing that trips me out the most is how fucking boring it is. How I spent like 3-4 months with a broken phone screen this past summer on my old phone and was using speech to text voice typing to get by because shopping for a new phone was such a chore that I just I just wasn't into it until a good friend basically forced me to buy a new phone by offering to pay for it because she was tired of my erratic voice typing messages so she put her foot down and made me get a new, working phone. (Ok, it was in trade for previous tech support help and being her nerdy friend that helps with that sort of thing, but still.)
Anyway, hey younger me? Watch me hit the post button on this without using my mouse and touching the screen. *yawn*
posted by loquacious at 12:28 PM on November 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
My laptop is about a year old now, maybe two years old from initial release date and it wasn't even that expensive, but it has a gorgeous HD touchscreen display and a digital pen, and the screen can fold back into tablet mode and so on. The laptop is well under an inch thick when closed, gets like 6-9 hours of battery life and it might even weigh less than the original Macbook Air.
The phone is what is now a basic smartphone but it already has a fingerprint reader that works, dual cameras on the back and an HD camera on the front and is just about as thin and light as anything out there, all with a screen width that I would have called a "phablet" what seems like a few years ago.
Heck, my phone has all kinds of cool, weird gesture controls like being able to shake it to turn the flashlight on and off, or flipping it face down to activate a "do not disturb" mode and more.
And here I am sitting on my patio under an umbrella in the rain for the past four hours or so and I'm using my phone's hotspot because I'm lazy and the house WiFi sucks out here especially when it's raining like this, and it's all been on batteries and I just don't care.. like the phone has *checks* oh 26 hours of battery left even though it's using the hotspot and I haven't plugged it in to charge it in like over 24 hours, and the laptop still has 5+ hours of battery left and there's basically zero worry or stress about it running out.
Like, late 1990s and early 2000s me would freak the fuck out seeing this stuff that makes the tablets and computers in Star Trek: TNG look clunky and old but here I am just using it to casually browse the news, do some doomscrolling and maybe watch some silly cat videos.
Oh, hey, my friend just messaged me. From the countryside in Northern India where they're on an emergency trip to help their friend with a death in the family. Somehow the message and pic they sent got all the way here hassle free with nothing more than a wifi connection in their hotel, and since I'm on my phone's hotspot and running on batteries I could be just about anywhere with a 4G connection. Cool, cool.
Very early 2000s me remembers paying something like $250 for a Palm Pilot that had no network connections at all, which is about 400-450 today. My current phone cost like, oh, $110 with shipping. That Palm Pilot had 8 megabytes of storage, this phone has 32GB, so about 4,000 times the storage space, and this doesn't include the 128gb SD card in there. And here I am using google as a calculator over a 4G hotspot connection "wasting" some data packets just because it was slightly less keystrokes than opening the calculator app on my laptop.
Yeah, younger past me would totally freak the fuck out if they saw my current laptop and phone, and then they'd freak the fuck out again about the fact that I found it to be so, so boring and normal. Especially considering how boring and normal these devices are today and that they weren't even close to the cutting, bleeding edge of personal electronics.
They'd also probably be upset about how much other electronics these devices have replaced, like the fact I don't really have any use for a dedicated MP3 player any more, or a GPS, or that I don't carry my good camera around nearly as much as I could or should. Or that my laptop doesn't even have an ethernet port, an optical drive, or even a mechanical HDD and it's all just chips, now, though younger me would be really into SSDs and how fast my computer can boot.
Shoot, they'd also probably be upset that I actually like my touchscreen laptop and I that I actually use it. That I find it handy to be able to just touch the screen directly to manipulate my desktop and windows. It seems like just a few years ago that I was saying I hated touch screen laptops or the very act of touching a screen at all.
And all of this being said the thing that trips me out the most is how fucking boring it is. How I spent like 3-4 months with a broken phone screen this past summer on my old phone and was using speech to text voice typing to get by because shopping for a new phone was such a chore that I just I just wasn't into it until a good friend basically forced me to buy a new phone by offering to pay for it because she was tired of my erratic voice typing messages so she put her foot down and made me get a new, working phone. (Ok, it was in trade for previous tech support help and being her nerdy friend that helps with that sort of thing, but still.)
Anyway, hey younger me? Watch me hit the post button on this without using my mouse and touching the screen. *yawn*
posted by loquacious at 12:28 PM on November 28, 2021 [7 favorites]
The reason so many high school classes were/are so specific to a given program has a lot more to do with the pressures put on public schooling by the business sector to be job training schools. Businesses have a need for people who know Word or Excel? Guess what high school computer classes teach?
Nah. At least when I was in high school, the reason was more that they didn’t have people who knew enough background to teach it the other way, because there were much higher paying jobs for such folks. In both types of instruction, students learn how to do specific tasks in eg. Word and Excel. In the more common mode, that’s all they learn; whereas in the other mode, they learn it as specific, illustrative examples of broader concepts. Businesses have a need for the latter. For example, employees having a hard time adapting to new operating system versions or new versions of business software is a significant resource drain for many businesses. Employees who learned the generic principles common to all operating systems are able to adapt, on the other hand.
posted by eviemath at 12:28 PM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
Nah. At least when I was in high school, the reason was more that they didn’t have people who knew enough background to teach it the other way, because there were much higher paying jobs for such folks. In both types of instruction, students learn how to do specific tasks in eg. Word and Excel. In the more common mode, that’s all they learn; whereas in the other mode, they learn it as specific, illustrative examples of broader concepts. Businesses have a need for the latter. For example, employees having a hard time adapting to new operating system versions or new versions of business software is a significant resource drain for many businesses. Employees who learned the generic principles common to all operating systems are able to adapt, on the other hand.
posted by eviemath at 12:28 PM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
I keep a road atlas in my car at all times, even though I haven't touched it in the 9 years I've owned this car because GPS on a phone is easier to use while actually driving. But I still know how to use it if I need to.
My local library no longer maintains a physical card catalog (and their computer-based one is good). In fact, in college in the early 80's I was part of a work-study program to convert the university's card catalog to computer. I don't know the Dewey decimal system by heart, but I had a lot of practice using a physical card catalog to do research for school (plus my mom was a librarian, so that knowledge was de rigueur.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:33 PM on November 28, 2021
My local library no longer maintains a physical card catalog (and their computer-based one is good). In fact, in college in the early 80's I was part of a work-study program to convert the university's card catalog to computer. I don't know the Dewey decimal system by heart, but I had a lot of practice using a physical card catalog to do research for school (plus my mom was a librarian, so that knowledge was de rigueur.
posted by Greg_Ace at 12:33 PM on November 28, 2021
I don't want to risk turning this thread into a bunch of Kids These Days anecdotes, but the other day we were chatting at the family table and the subject of Silly Putty came up. My eleven year old mostly plays with "slime", which is like SP but more viscous, so she completely understood what silly putty is. What set the bell of doom tolling was that my wife and I mentioned how we both got in trouble for putting silly putty on the newspaper comics page and then transferring the ink to the dining room wall. My daughter innocently asked if newspapers always had comics in them, and that's when we realized that she didn't know that because we've never had a physical newspaper subscription since before she was born. That was a sobering moment.
On the other hand, I never expected to see vinyl records after about 1990 or so, and yet we have a record player with a pretty decent LP collection, so there's that. However, I freely accept we're niche enthusiasts and the vast majority of people nowadays get their music from Spotify or wherever.
posted by fortitude25 at 12:42 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
On the other hand, I never expected to see vinyl records after about 1990 or so, and yet we have a record player with a pretty decent LP collection, so there's that. However, I freely accept we're niche enthusiasts and the vast majority of people nowadays get their music from Spotify or wherever.
posted by fortitude25 at 12:42 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
I had a conversation with my grandmother when I was a young man in the mid-80's
I had a simular conversation with my mother around the same time. She also grew up sans running water, electricity... She and her family got the Spanish Flu in 1918. From the sound of it, they caught the first and far less horrific wave but still...
I asked her What did you do!?
Stayed in bed for week, was her reply.
I did not ask for details.
When I was in high school I had read about the death of the last man to fight in the Civil War in Life magazine and knew a still living veteran of the Spanish American War. The thing about the Past is it is just not that past at all.
posted by y2karl at 12:52 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
I had a simular conversation with my mother around the same time. She also grew up sans running water, electricity... She and her family got the Spanish Flu in 1918. From the sound of it, they caught the first and far less horrific wave but still...
I asked her What did you do!?
Stayed in bed for week, was her reply.
I did not ask for details.
When I was in high school I had read about the death of the last man to fight in the Civil War in Life magazine and knew a still living veteran of the Spanish American War. The thing about the Past is it is just not that past at all.
posted by y2karl at 12:52 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Inkwell dread? An ancient meme was dipping the pigtail of the girl who sat in front of you in your inkwell. It is googable. Inky mid-20th-century fun was the first primitive ball point pens (late 1940s). They leaked a tenacious greasy blue ink that would deeply stain shirts, fingers, and mouths (of careless pen-nibblers).
In general, I think any urbanite today could navigate NYC in 1900 pretty successfully. Lots has changed, but mostly in recognizable ways. But go back to 1870, and it is an alien world--you might as well be in 1470.
posted by hexatron at 1:10 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
In general, I think any urbanite today could navigate NYC in 1900 pretty successfully. Lots has changed, but mostly in recognizable ways. But go back to 1870, and it is an alien world--you might as well be in 1470.
posted by hexatron at 1:10 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I remember when cranks used to have to staple their rants to telephone poles
posted by thelonius at 1:59 PM on November 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
posted by thelonius at 1:59 PM on November 28, 2021 [8 favorites]
My local library no longer maintains a physical card catalog (and their computer-based one is good). In fact, in college in the early 80's I was part of a work-study program to convert the university's card catalog to computer.
I still know how to use a card catalog, and I definitely still understand the DDS and know I've used it in recent years.
On the other hand - and I this is a total tangent, I guess - I was lucky enough to grow up near an absolutely enormous local library that existed despite being in a notably conservative area due to a massive oil baron trust fund.
And in hindsight I know I took it for granted, especially given my local politics and funding attitudes. I just thought all libraries were that awesome until I learned that it was larger than some major metro city libraries and exceedingly rare for the kind of suburban city it was located in.
They were doing electronic catalogs and old school green screen touch screen terminals for catalogs as early as the late 70s or very early 80s. I think they still had backup card catalogs for the main collection but you had to go out of your way to use them, and they had catalog terminals all over the place that were much faster to use. I know they kept their card catalogs front and center for the reference, maps and microfiche department, but that stuff was also all in the electronic/network catalog.
They also had automated book sorting and returns via barcode tagging and book conveyors, elevators and other automated handling tools very very early in the history of automated library tech stuff, and even had RF-magnetic anti-theft tags long before retail stores had them, or true RFID tags were a thing.
I found it all fascinating, especially the real laser scanners for checkouts and the book handling systems. Heck, even my library card had a barcode on it way back then and loved that I got to play with lasers while checking out books, some of which were definitely all about lasers or computers.
I remember checking out books and immediately returning them just because I liked checking out books so much and I wanted to see the laser barcode scanner again. My local grocery stores didn't even have laser scanners yet, so that library barcode scanner might be the first real laser beam I ever saw in my life.
Anyway, just taking a trip down memory lane. The past might be a foreign country but it's also notable how the future wasn't evenly distributed back then, either, and never has been.
posted by loquacious at 2:24 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
I still know how to use a card catalog, and I definitely still understand the DDS and know I've used it in recent years.
On the other hand - and I this is a total tangent, I guess - I was lucky enough to grow up near an absolutely enormous local library that existed despite being in a notably conservative area due to a massive oil baron trust fund.
And in hindsight I know I took it for granted, especially given my local politics and funding attitudes. I just thought all libraries were that awesome until I learned that it was larger than some major metro city libraries and exceedingly rare for the kind of suburban city it was located in.
They were doing electronic catalogs and old school green screen touch screen terminals for catalogs as early as the late 70s or very early 80s. I think they still had backup card catalogs for the main collection but you had to go out of your way to use them, and they had catalog terminals all over the place that were much faster to use. I know they kept their card catalogs front and center for the reference, maps and microfiche department, but that stuff was also all in the electronic/network catalog.
They also had automated book sorting and returns via barcode tagging and book conveyors, elevators and other automated handling tools very very early in the history of automated library tech stuff, and even had RF-magnetic anti-theft tags long before retail stores had them, or true RFID tags were a thing.
I found it all fascinating, especially the real laser scanners for checkouts and the book handling systems. Heck, even my library card had a barcode on it way back then and loved that I got to play with lasers while checking out books, some of which were definitely all about lasers or computers.
I remember checking out books and immediately returning them just because I liked checking out books so much and I wanted to see the laser barcode scanner again. My local grocery stores didn't even have laser scanners yet, so that library barcode scanner might be the first real laser beam I ever saw in my life.
Anyway, just taking a trip down memory lane. The past might be a foreign country but it's also notable how the future wasn't evenly distributed back then, either, and never has been.
posted by loquacious at 2:24 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
(Taking a screenshot of the article, I noticed that the little app I used featured a floppy disk as the icon for "save.")
posted by doctornemo at 2:46 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
posted by doctornemo at 2:46 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
This is a fine passage:
even though humanity is really good at dealing with change, we are bad at anticipating it. We are always living within a whole cluster of parentheses, but too often we are completely oblivious to this state of affairs and almost never think about anticipating their ends. Even though we intuitively know that technology is always changing, we still think of individual skills necessitated by categories of technologies as long-lasting or ever-present. We might recognize that cars will improve, but there is a big difference between not having to manually roll down windows any longer or fiddle with a cassette player, and not having to even know how to drive anymore. Information storage methods have changed a lot since magnetic tape and floppy disks, but we are still used to the idea of storing information, even if it’s on the cloud. But being able to anticipate when basic skills will be rendered outdated is something we are ill-prepared for. We are in an ever-present state of technological prelapsarianism, forever unable to recognize that the technologies around us—and the society that they describe and create—are in a continuous state of future obsolescence.
Futuring is damned hard.
posted by doctornemo at 2:48 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
even though humanity is really good at dealing with change, we are bad at anticipating it. We are always living within a whole cluster of parentheses, but too often we are completely oblivious to this state of affairs and almost never think about anticipating their ends. Even though we intuitively know that technology is always changing, we still think of individual skills necessitated by categories of technologies as long-lasting or ever-present. We might recognize that cars will improve, but there is a big difference between not having to manually roll down windows any longer or fiddle with a cassette player, and not having to even know how to drive anymore. Information storage methods have changed a lot since magnetic tape and floppy disks, but we are still used to the idea of storing information, even if it’s on the cloud. But being able to anticipate when basic skills will be rendered outdated is something we are ill-prepared for. We are in an ever-present state of technological prelapsarianism, forever unable to recognize that the technologies around us—and the society that they describe and create—are in a continuous state of future obsolescence.
Futuring is damned hard.
posted by doctornemo at 2:48 PM on November 28, 2021 [3 favorites]
Most of my grandparents lived long enough to go from growing up with no running water to fully embracing computers and digital connectivity of all kinds. I am old enough to have experienced party lines, but also was able to start using computers at a young age; I've also lived without running water and it is important to recognize that millions and millions of people still do.
I am dubious about the actual timeline to get there, but I think it would be great if autonomous cars (or some other technology) eventually became a reality to the point that young people didn't need to learn how to drive manually unless they wanted to as a hobby.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:34 PM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
I am dubious about the actual timeline to get there, but I think it would be great if autonomous cars (or some other technology) eventually became a reality to the point that young people didn't need to learn how to drive manually unless they wanted to as a hobby.
posted by Dip Flash at 3:34 PM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
...life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesisposted by kirkaracha at 7:02 PM on November 28, 2021 [1 favorite]
I've also lived without running water and it is important to recognize that millions and millions of people still do.
"The future is already here; it just isn’t evenly distributed."
Also, we don’t know which parts are the future.
posted by clew at 7:10 PM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
"The future is already here; it just isn’t evenly distributed."
Also, we don’t know which parts are the future.
posted by clew at 7:10 PM on November 28, 2021 [4 favorites]
The thing I have thought about the last couple months is the obsolete stuff that was COOL NEW TECH for me. CDs were the super modern Internet age thing, these days almost as rare as LPs.
And how being a "computer guy" all my life was making me a modern, but now I am a dinosaur because I want a mouse and keyboard and a PC and find smartphones such a hassle.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:10 PM on November 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
And how being a "computer guy" all my life was making me a modern, but now I am a dinosaur because I want a mouse and keyboard and a PC and find smartphones such a hassle.
posted by Meatbomb at 8:10 PM on November 28, 2021 [5 favorites]
we don’t know which parts are the future
To me, darkly, the obvious future parts are how the bad people don't die.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:59 PM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
To me, darkly, the obvious future parts are how the bad people don't die.
posted by Reasonably Everything Happens at 10:59 PM on November 28, 2021 [2 favorites]
The one that always gets me is the fax machine. I am old enough to remember there not really being faxes, then that they existed but only at big companies, then that they were a consumer product (my parents had one!), then that they were essentially folded into computers (I remember receiving faxes via a modem that appeared as a JPEG file), and then .... no faxes anywhere. It's just ... poof. (Yes, I know the IRS still has fax machines, they are out there in the world but they just aren't the way we shift documents anymore).
posted by chavenet at 2:16 AM on November 29, 2021
posted by chavenet at 2:16 AM on November 29, 2021
MetaFilter: but now I am a dinosaur because I want a mouse and keyboard.
posted by loquacious at 3:42 AM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
posted by loquacious at 3:42 AM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
See these always throw me off because of how similar the past is to the present. Sure, some old technology is gone, but we still do the exact same things in slightly different ways. Like as a kid before the internet I spent my days talking on the phone, watching tv or videos, playing video games, going to school and stores, and my parents and kids do the exact same things. to get a real shift, you have to go back to times prior to home electricity or in-door plumbing. My grandparents say they would cancel school to pick crops then.
COVID was a generational thing - never had anything like that when I was a kid. But VHS, Betamax, or DVD? Whatever. The shift wasn't that dramatic.
Also about eating less meat, they used to have commercials on TV begging people to eat more meat in the 1980s.
I will say political beliefs have dramatically shifted since then. Like it used to be 100% Democratic policy to support historical districts and tell poor and minority people to move somewhere over there, even into the 1999s. That's wild to me.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:57 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
COVID was a generational thing - never had anything like that when I was a kid. But VHS, Betamax, or DVD? Whatever. The shift wasn't that dramatic.
Also about eating less meat, they used to have commercials on TV begging people to eat more meat in the 1980s.
I will say political beliefs have dramatically shifted since then. Like it used to be 100% Democratic policy to support historical districts and tell poor and minority people to move somewhere over there, even into the 1999s. That's wild to me.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:57 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
As an Emacs user, I am constantly aware of parentheses, but my technological infrastructure -- like cockroaches -- will probably never die.
posted by ChrisR at 8:56 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
posted by ChrisR at 8:56 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
COVID was a generational thing - never had anything like that when I was a kid.
We did. The HIV/AIDS crisis. A basic timeline here.
But it was swept under the rug socially and politically because LGBTQ - and gay men in particular - didn't count.
Yeah, HIV wasn't an extremely contagious respiratory virus on a global pandemic scale, and if you weren't aware of or involved with the queer community it was much easier to miss or ignore.
And I'm not placing blame, here, or trying to make anyone feel bad about it. The mainstream media and politics sure did everything they could to make the epidemic socially taboo to discuss or even talk about. People were protesting the lack of response for years and engaging in civil disobedience like die ins at the Capitol trying to bring awareness to the cause and even then it was still swept under the rug.
But for many people in gay communities it was a terrible epidemic that non-figuratively decimated their communities. Or worse than decimated over several decades, starting well before the 1980s when it finally started to gain some real attention in the late 80s and early 90s.
We lost a lot of notable people in the HIV epidemic. In no particular order, just picking some notable examples mostly from memory:
Keith Haring
Tom Fogarty (Creedance Clearwater Revival)
Liberace
Rock Hudson
Michel Foucault (Philosopher)
Isaac Asimov
Ricky Wilson (The B52s)
Miles Davis
Magic Johnson
When I last lived in SF in the late 2000s I met more than one person with memorials or altars in their home to all the people they personally knew that they lost to HIV.
I remember one person in particular who had their fridge covered in photos of people she had lost. It was dozens and dozens of people, including her ex husband or partner. She was really close to the gay community in SF because her then-husband came out as queer/trans back in the 1980s, and instead of a hard separation they went with co-parenting and she ended up being an Aunt to many, many gay and queer friends and had a huge adopted and social family in that community.
Personally I've been expecting a global pandemic like the one we're going through for years, if not decades. So have a lot of other people, including epidemiologists. The ease and cheap prices of global travel and economics made it clear that it wasn't an if, but a when, and we've had a few close calls with contagious pathogens like SARS, Swine Flu, H1N1 and even Ebola.
One way to look at the current pandemic is we're getting off lucky that it wasn't Ebola and that the transmission and mortality rates has been relatively low. If it had been Ebola I probably wouldn't even be able to post this comment because there would be serious global disruption and chaos happening by now after nearly three years of pandemic.
posted by loquacious at 10:13 AM on November 29, 2021 [12 favorites]
We did. The HIV/AIDS crisis. A basic timeline here.
But it was swept under the rug socially and politically because LGBTQ - and gay men in particular - didn't count.
Yeah, HIV wasn't an extremely contagious respiratory virus on a global pandemic scale, and if you weren't aware of or involved with the queer community it was much easier to miss or ignore.
And I'm not placing blame, here, or trying to make anyone feel bad about it. The mainstream media and politics sure did everything they could to make the epidemic socially taboo to discuss or even talk about. People were protesting the lack of response for years and engaging in civil disobedience like die ins at the Capitol trying to bring awareness to the cause and even then it was still swept under the rug.
But for many people in gay communities it was a terrible epidemic that non-figuratively decimated their communities. Or worse than decimated over several decades, starting well before the 1980s when it finally started to gain some real attention in the late 80s and early 90s.
We lost a lot of notable people in the HIV epidemic. In no particular order, just picking some notable examples mostly from memory:
Keith Haring
Tom Fogarty (Creedance Clearwater Revival)
Liberace
Rock Hudson
Michel Foucault (Philosopher)
Isaac Asimov
Ricky Wilson (The B52s)
Miles Davis
Magic Johnson
When I last lived in SF in the late 2000s I met more than one person with memorials or altars in their home to all the people they personally knew that they lost to HIV.
I remember one person in particular who had their fridge covered in photos of people she had lost. It was dozens and dozens of people, including her ex husband or partner. She was really close to the gay community in SF because her then-husband came out as queer/trans back in the 1980s, and instead of a hard separation they went with co-parenting and she ended up being an Aunt to many, many gay and queer friends and had a huge adopted and social family in that community.
Personally I've been expecting a global pandemic like the one we're going through for years, if not decades. So have a lot of other people, including epidemiologists. The ease and cheap prices of global travel and economics made it clear that it wasn't an if, but a when, and we've had a few close calls with contagious pathogens like SARS, Swine Flu, H1N1 and even Ebola.
One way to look at the current pandemic is we're getting off lucky that it wasn't Ebola and that the transmission and mortality rates has been relatively low. If it had been Ebola I probably wouldn't even be able to post this comment because there would be serious global disruption and chaos happening by now after nearly three years of pandemic.
posted by loquacious at 10:13 AM on November 29, 2021 [12 favorites]
We did. The HIV/AIDS crisis
I remember AIDs. My aunt ran a nursing hospice center in El Paso for AIDs patients - most near death - most abandoned by their families. I went there a few times in the summer, had to use a fake name because a lot were former Mexican mafia. I remember her complaints about the government response (oddly enough in her older age she became a hardcore Trumper before dying - must be something that happens in the brain). We also went up the Franklin Mountains to spread ashes. I disagree it was anything like COVID. I didn't miss a year of school like my kids did, etc. I'm talking the overall impact, which was basically nothing other than a few comments in health class.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:27 AM on November 29, 2021
I remember AIDs. My aunt ran a nursing hospice center in El Paso for AIDs patients - most near death - most abandoned by their families. I went there a few times in the summer, had to use a fake name because a lot were former Mexican mafia. I remember her complaints about the government response (oddly enough in her older age she became a hardcore Trumper before dying - must be something that happens in the brain). We also went up the Franklin Mountains to spread ashes. I disagree it was anything like COVID. I didn't miss a year of school like my kids did, etc. I'm talking the overall impact, which was basically nothing other than a few comments in health class.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:27 AM on November 29, 2021
If it had been Ebola I probably wouldn't even be able to post this comment because there would be serious global disruption and chaos happening by now after nearly three years of pandemic.
This is neither here nor there regarding the obsolesce of processing and tech stuff, but no-one I know who was involved in the Ebola case in Dallas (from nurses to doctors to city personnel) had any respect for the CDC at any level - not the local operators, not the bureaucrats, none, while dealing with Ebola, and so they were also none too surprised at the CDC's inability to communicate about/deal with COVID effectively.
Of course this is all 3rd hand through my work, I don't personally know much about the case nor was I involved at all in any way, and am nowhere near as jaded about the CDC's handling of COVID as they all are.
Of course the point stands - the world didn't change that much because TVs got flatter or more media was available at our fingertips or you didn't need a 5 minute conversation with a librarian to use the card catalogue (which you did need because there were multiple classification systems between different libraries). We could imagine stuff like that quite easily, just as a pandemic was not at all unimaginable. I never cared too much about the Cold War, but dying due to disease or war was not unimaginable.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:09 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
This is neither here nor there regarding the obsolesce of processing and tech stuff, but no-one I know who was involved in the Ebola case in Dallas (from nurses to doctors to city personnel) had any respect for the CDC at any level - not the local operators, not the bureaucrats, none, while dealing with Ebola, and so they were also none too surprised at the CDC's inability to communicate about/deal with COVID effectively.
Of course this is all 3rd hand through my work, I don't personally know much about the case nor was I involved at all in any way, and am nowhere near as jaded about the CDC's handling of COVID as they all are.
Of course the point stands - the world didn't change that much because TVs got flatter or more media was available at our fingertips or you didn't need a 5 minute conversation with a librarian to use the card catalogue (which you did need because there were multiple classification systems between different libraries). We could imagine stuff like that quite easily, just as a pandemic was not at all unimaginable. I never cared too much about the Cold War, but dying due to disease or war was not unimaginable.
posted by The_Vegetables at 11:09 AM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
I didn't miss a year of school like my kids did, etc. I'm talking the overall impact, which was basically nothing other than a few comments in health class.
Sure. I'm just trying to share that the perspectives of others during the 80s and 90s was much more impactful than this.
History isn't evenly distributed, either.
posted by loquacious at 12:41 PM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
Sure. I'm just trying to share that the perspectives of others during the 80s and 90s was much more impactful than this.
History isn't evenly distributed, either.
posted by loquacious at 12:41 PM on November 29, 2021 [2 favorites]
I thought this was a lot of fun.
I'm definitely in the camp of being simultaneously excited by new advances and nostalgic for the ones that I don't really want to see go. But the only thing that really gets to me is the secretary/butler>answering machine>voicemail>texting transition. I can get over losing the benefits of answering machines (make your own fun messages! Call screening so you can decide whether or not to pick up!) for the colder benefits of voicemail, but losing voicemail to texts (which is rapidly turning into people who never use their phone for calling at all)? That just seems like madness to me. Leaving voice messages is so much better than texting. Fight me. Yes, listening to them is far worse than reading texts. But you're also less likely to misunderstand them. (I don't actually mean fight me - I know you're out there and outnumber people like me, or it wouldn't be happening. But sheesh). It's the only thing I can think of that brings out my inner Andy Rooney (who?)
posted by Mchelly at 12:42 PM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
I'm definitely in the camp of being simultaneously excited by new advances and nostalgic for the ones that I don't really want to see go. But the only thing that really gets to me is the secretary/butler>answering machine>voicemail>texting transition. I can get over losing the benefits of answering machines (make your own fun messages! Call screening so you can decide whether or not to pick up!) for the colder benefits of voicemail, but losing voicemail to texts (which is rapidly turning into people who never use their phone for calling at all)? That just seems like madness to me. Leaving voice messages is so much better than texting. Fight me. Yes, listening to them is far worse than reading texts. But you're also less likely to misunderstand them. (I don't actually mean fight me - I know you're out there and outnumber people like me, or it wouldn't be happening. But sheesh). It's the only thing I can think of that brings out my inner Andy Rooney (who?)
posted by Mchelly at 12:42 PM on November 29, 2021 [1 favorite]
Futuring is damned hard.
Very true. And making meta-predictions about the future of "the future" is even harder.
I remember reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, which was published in 1970, and predicted a future where the rate of change of society kept increasing over time, until an increasing number of people were left behind—"future shocked"—and largely unable to function.
Of course, that wasn't the only prediction, and some of them were rather good (disposable goods, planned obsolescence, tech nomads), but the key one about "future shock" never really happened.
In large part, I think that's because technology can't, almost by definition, outpace humanity's ability to cope with it, because technological change itself is driven by humans. Absent strong AI bringing about the Singularity, it's always going to be people doing the inventing and R&D and design work. Someone has to have the idea, design the product, market the product, and (a lot of) other people have to see a need for the product and buy it, for it to become a part of our lives and general culture.
You can certainly outpace and leave behind segments of the population; as others have mentioned, the future is in no way evenly distributed. And as people get older and our minds get less flexible, it becomes harder and harder, at least for many of us, to remain as conversant with new technology and the social rules that surround it as we used to. But there's no way for technology to leave humanity in general in the dust—it's like a horse outrunning itself. It can't happen. If a new invention or device doesn't fill an apparent social need, it doesn't become popular, doesn't get adopted, and doesn't become a cultural artifact.
Toffler also—and maybe I'm not giving him enough credit in my memory of the book—didn't seem to give much credit to the positive effects of technology. My recollection is one of his predictions was an increased shallowness to human relationships, driven by increased physical mobility and economic precarity, such that people would need to migrate around the world for work. Tinder and Grindr aside, in large part I don't think this really panned out. It turns out that social connections are really important to people, such that their physical mobility is (at least in part) restricted by those social connections and their ability to extend them. As people have been able to keep in touch with each other better over great distances, their ability to move around without becoming totally alienated has increased, not decreased. And with COVID, we have seen that technology actually facilitates remote work to an extent that allows workers to (sometimes) engage in labor-market arbitrage: keeping a high-salary job while moving to a lower-cost area, sometimes without telling anyone, because all their work is done remotely. It remains to be seen how stable these arrangements are, but they're working for some people right now, and it's almost entirely because of technology making many more jobs remote-work-able.
All that said... I think it's important for people to plan their lives with the idea that they may not be able to—or want to—stay on the bleeding edge of technology forever. Watching my parents age, I've become very aware that there will probably come a time when new tech will stop making sense to me, because I won't be the one it's being designed for anymore. C'est la vie.. My hope is that by that time, we'll have realized the benefits of interoperability rather than walled gardens, and I'll still be able to stay in touch with people over email or text messages or its equivalent, using my ancient QWERTY keyboard and mouse.
I was joking half-seriously on Mastodon the other day, that in the same way that some "memory care homes" have simulated 1950s and 1960s villages for people whose minds have slipped to the point of not being able to tolerate modernity without continuous confusion, that by the time I get too senile, maybe they'll have homes where they continually simulate the late 1990s or something. And I'll be able to sit there, working from a (presumably emulated) Macintosh running System 7.5.5, attached to a little fake "modem" that makes 14.4k dialup noises and translates my inbound and outbound AOL emails to whatever they're using by then, blissful in my ignorance but still able to communicate with my grandkids or whomever still wants to talk to me.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:34 PM on November 29, 2021 [4 favorites]
Very true. And making meta-predictions about the future of "the future" is even harder.
I remember reading Alvin Toffler's Future Shock, which was published in 1970, and predicted a future where the rate of change of society kept increasing over time, until an increasing number of people were left behind—"future shocked"—and largely unable to function.
Of course, that wasn't the only prediction, and some of them were rather good (disposable goods, planned obsolescence, tech nomads), but the key one about "future shock" never really happened.
In large part, I think that's because technology can't, almost by definition, outpace humanity's ability to cope with it, because technological change itself is driven by humans. Absent strong AI bringing about the Singularity, it's always going to be people doing the inventing and R&D and design work. Someone has to have the idea, design the product, market the product, and (a lot of) other people have to see a need for the product and buy it, for it to become a part of our lives and general culture.
You can certainly outpace and leave behind segments of the population; as others have mentioned, the future is in no way evenly distributed. And as people get older and our minds get less flexible, it becomes harder and harder, at least for many of us, to remain as conversant with new technology and the social rules that surround it as we used to. But there's no way for technology to leave humanity in general in the dust—it's like a horse outrunning itself. It can't happen. If a new invention or device doesn't fill an apparent social need, it doesn't become popular, doesn't get adopted, and doesn't become a cultural artifact.
Toffler also—and maybe I'm not giving him enough credit in my memory of the book—didn't seem to give much credit to the positive effects of technology. My recollection is one of his predictions was an increased shallowness to human relationships, driven by increased physical mobility and economic precarity, such that people would need to migrate around the world for work. Tinder and Grindr aside, in large part I don't think this really panned out. It turns out that social connections are really important to people, such that their physical mobility is (at least in part) restricted by those social connections and their ability to extend them. As people have been able to keep in touch with each other better over great distances, their ability to move around without becoming totally alienated has increased, not decreased. And with COVID, we have seen that technology actually facilitates remote work to an extent that allows workers to (sometimes) engage in labor-market arbitrage: keeping a high-salary job while moving to a lower-cost area, sometimes without telling anyone, because all their work is done remotely. It remains to be seen how stable these arrangements are, but they're working for some people right now, and it's almost entirely because of technology making many more jobs remote-work-able.
All that said... I think it's important for people to plan their lives with the idea that they may not be able to—or want to—stay on the bleeding edge of technology forever. Watching my parents age, I've become very aware that there will probably come a time when new tech will stop making sense to me, because I won't be the one it's being designed for anymore. C'est la vie.. My hope is that by that time, we'll have realized the benefits of interoperability rather than walled gardens, and I'll still be able to stay in touch with people over email or text messages or its equivalent, using my ancient QWERTY keyboard and mouse.
I was joking half-seriously on Mastodon the other day, that in the same way that some "memory care homes" have simulated 1950s and 1960s villages for people whose minds have slipped to the point of not being able to tolerate modernity without continuous confusion, that by the time I get too senile, maybe they'll have homes where they continually simulate the late 1990s or something. And I'll be able to sit there, working from a (presumably emulated) Macintosh running System 7.5.5, attached to a little fake "modem" that makes 14.4k dialup noises and translates my inbound and outbound AOL emails to whatever they're using by then, blissful in my ignorance but still able to communicate with my grandkids or whomever still wants to talk to me.
posted by Kadin2048 at 2:34 PM on November 29, 2021 [4 favorites]
You know, a lot of the technological advancements mentioned in these discussions are just improvements in convenience. I think that people overrate how much they change our lives.
In communications, to me, the biggest advance to a new era was the telegraph, because it made messages travel faster than a courier could take them. Didn't they fight the Battle of New Orleans after the war was over, because no one knew the war was over? Radio, TV, and phones of course were huge, but they are developments within the new era initiated by the telegraph.
The cell phone, particularly once fully developed into the internet connected pocket computer, may be in the same league. But, you know, people talk about stuff like TV remotes or one-click purchasing as if they are in the same transformational category as vaccines or air travel.
posted by thelonius at 4:32 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]
In communications, to me, the biggest advance to a new era was the telegraph, because it made messages travel faster than a courier could take them. Didn't they fight the Battle of New Orleans after the war was over, because no one knew the war was over? Radio, TV, and phones of course were huge, but they are developments within the new era initiated by the telegraph.
The cell phone, particularly once fully developed into the internet connected pocket computer, may be in the same league. But, you know, people talk about stuff like TV remotes or one-click purchasing as if they are in the same transformational category as vaccines or air travel.
posted by thelonius at 4:32 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]
The one that always gets me is the fax machine. I am old enough to remember there not really being faxes, then that they existed but only at big companies, then that they were a consumer product (my parents had one!), then that they were essentially folded into computers (I remember receiving faxes via a modem that appeared as a JPEG file), and then .... no faxes anywhere. It's just ... poof. (Yes, I know the IRS still has fax machines, they are out there in the world but they just aren't the way we shift documents anymore).
I had a summer job as a clerk in an insurance office in the late 80s. Probably used a fax machine 25 times a day. (I was thinking about that job the other day -- people still used to come into a physical office to meet with their dedicated, named broker to make policy changes, and the older clients would clearly DRESS UP to do so. My boss would send page long custom cover letters with each renewal [dictated into a microcassette, transcribed with a footpedal and a pair of rigid rubber headphones that would look like they were from the 1800s to a kid today]. And of course there was a full time receptionist simply to cover the front desk and phone, and a little cubby for the pink paper slips. Every desk still had a manual typewriter and a paper ribbon adding machine (the really good secretaries got to have the coveted selectrics, but the champ had an olivetti with a spinning disk of little rubber feet in it, because it was the fastest. ) I remember my boss bemoaning the cost but raving about the results.)
when I was in grad school in the mid 90s about 20 of the department were slated to go to a local convention and the paper forms had to be type-filled, no handwriting. There was an ooooold selectric identical to the ones I had used, in the student mailroom, and word got around that I knew how to load it and centre the paper etc. I eventually just took the typewriter into my lab and set it on a bench because it was faster than getting pulled out of there every couple of hours.
10 years ago in a small engineering consulting office, we still had a huge paper fileroom and the only way to make pdfs was to print off hard copies and then scan them back to pdf on the same machine that had just printed them. Nowadays 95% of my office has absolutely no way to manage excess paper and it's bizarre to most of the junior staff that you would need to.
About 5 years ago I suddenly needed to send an urgent fax to the Cdn border authority (had a contractor held up in customs). Our office had just moved. it was 8pm or so and I ran over to where the photocopiers had been set up and discovered that we had no fax machine; it had been decided in the move not to bother with one. so I madly had to set up some electronic service with my own credit card. I was PISSED and made a lot of noise to office management...and I am not aware that a single fax has needed to be sent, since.
and then oh jeezis SMARTPHONES, don't even get me started.
posted by hearthpig at 5:24 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]
I had a summer job as a clerk in an insurance office in the late 80s. Probably used a fax machine 25 times a day. (I was thinking about that job the other day -- people still used to come into a physical office to meet with their dedicated, named broker to make policy changes, and the older clients would clearly DRESS UP to do so. My boss would send page long custom cover letters with each renewal [dictated into a microcassette, transcribed with a footpedal and a pair of rigid rubber headphones that would look like they were from the 1800s to a kid today]. And of course there was a full time receptionist simply to cover the front desk and phone, and a little cubby for the pink paper slips. Every desk still had a manual typewriter and a paper ribbon adding machine (the really good secretaries got to have the coveted selectrics, but the champ had an olivetti with a spinning disk of little rubber feet in it, because it was the fastest. ) I remember my boss bemoaning the cost but raving about the results.)
when I was in grad school in the mid 90s about 20 of the department were slated to go to a local convention and the paper forms had to be type-filled, no handwriting. There was an ooooold selectric identical to the ones I had used, in the student mailroom, and word got around that I knew how to load it and centre the paper etc. I eventually just took the typewriter into my lab and set it on a bench because it was faster than getting pulled out of there every couple of hours.
10 years ago in a small engineering consulting office, we still had a huge paper fileroom and the only way to make pdfs was to print off hard copies and then scan them back to pdf on the same machine that had just printed them. Nowadays 95% of my office has absolutely no way to manage excess paper and it's bizarre to most of the junior staff that you would need to.
About 5 years ago I suddenly needed to send an urgent fax to the Cdn border authority (had a contractor held up in customs). Our office had just moved. it was 8pm or so and I ran over to where the photocopiers had been set up and discovered that we had no fax machine; it had been decided in the move not to bother with one. so I madly had to set up some electronic service with my own credit card. I was PISSED and made a lot of noise to office management...and I am not aware that a single fax has needed to be sent, since.
and then oh jeezis SMARTPHONES, don't even get me started.
posted by hearthpig at 5:24 AM on November 30, 2021 [2 favorites]
My local library no longer maintains a physical card catalog
I miss card catalogs. Not using them per se, but the amazing way they smelled. All the polished wood and old paper of the cards...and then there was the satisfyingly tactile experience of flipping through all the cards to find what you needed.
I don't miss having to hold my place with one finger while scribbling down a reference, though.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:56 AM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
I miss card catalogs. Not using them per se, but the amazing way they smelled. All the polished wood and old paper of the cards...and then there was the satisfyingly tactile experience of flipping through all the cards to find what you needed.
I don't miss having to hold my place with one finger while scribbling down a reference, though.
posted by Mr. Bad Example at 6:56 AM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
Kadin2048: "by the time I get too senile, maybe they'll have homes where they continually simulate the late 1990s or something. And I'll be able to sit there, working from a (presumably emulated) Macintosh running System 7.5.5, attached to a little fake "modem" that makes 14.4k dialup noises and translates my inbound and outbound AOL emails to whatever they're using by then, blissful in my ignorance but still able to communicate with my grandkids or whomever still wants to talk to me."
Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End features exactly this idea.
There's one "parenthesized" technology that by dint of lucky timing, I was able to avoid entirely: punchcards (or pencil-marked cards, whatever those are called). My high school had a minicomputer, and expanded computer instruction for the class after mine (this obviously wasn't "how to use Excel"; this was simple programming); there weren't enough terminals to go around, so the younger kids had to use punchcards. When I got to college, the university had phased out punchcards the year before. So I missed punchcards, but I wouldn't say I missed punchcards.
posted by adamrice at 7:12 AM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End features exactly this idea.
There's one "parenthesized" technology that by dint of lucky timing, I was able to avoid entirely: punchcards (or pencil-marked cards, whatever those are called). My high school had a minicomputer, and expanded computer instruction for the class after mine (this obviously wasn't "how to use Excel"; this was simple programming); there weren't enough terminals to go around, so the younger kids had to use punchcards. When I got to college, the university had phased out punchcards the year before. So I missed punchcards, but I wouldn't say I missed punchcards.
posted by adamrice at 7:12 AM on November 30, 2021 [1 favorite]
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Awhile ago, I made a call and, to my astonishment, got a busy signal.
"I got a busy signal!" I said to my partner.
"What's a busy signal?" asked my kids.
I'm interested in the overlap of technology: somewhere, someone is among the first to use the newest thing, and elsewhere, someone is among the last to use the obsolete thing. In 1974, in rural Michigan, my family was on a party line, which was pretty rare at that point. I was nine, and the desks at my elementary school still had openings in the top right for inkwells—can you imagine a roomful of schoolkids with inkwells?
posted by Orlop at 8:20 AM on November 28, 2021 [12 favorites]