Category: technology

Are We Frozen in Time?, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 14 Comments

Reader Jodi kind of beat me to it but I still want to discuss my hypothesis as to why fashion, pop music, hair-styles, etc. seem frozen in time and have been this way for the past 20 years.

There is one area of our lives that has been changing extremely rapidly. And that, of course, is technology. I look at the cell phone I used in 2010, and it looks completely outdated and very primitive. Just a little over a year ago, however, that phone was the pinnacle of complexity and sophistication. My first Kindle that I bought in 2008, looked like a miracle to me. By the side of the recently released Kindle Fire tablet, however, it is clunky and almost prehistoric. 🙂 Just 10 years ago, could anybody have imagined the ubiquity of tablets that we experience today? Just 20 years ago, did anybody who is not an author of science fiction envision this permanent sense of connectedness to the world that technology allows us to have today?

We have seen the rise and the death of Blockbuster, then Netflix. I have no doubt that we will all live to see the death of television just like we have witnessed the demise of land-lines and public phones. I still remember the time when you always needed to have a quarter on you to make a call from a public phone in case of an emergency. And it wasn’t all that many years ago. I’m talking about 2000-2001. Something tells me my niece Klubnikis will need to be taken to a museum to see what a payphone and a TV-set even are. Gosh, I’m so ancient I remember rotary phones. And does anybody want a bet that there are people reading this blog right now who have never used a rotary phone? I’m sure there are some who had to Google it.

Technology changes so fast that we need to expend a lot of energy to adapt to it. Against the background of constantly changing computers, tablets, apps, cell phones, websites, plugins, gadgets, etc., a relative stability in other areas of our lives allows us to compensate for the trauma of such rapid and constant transformations. Since the technological innovation doesn’t seem to slow down even a little, it seems like we are doomed to the same boring clothes and hairdos for a while longer.

>Struggling with Computers

~ Clarissa ~ Leave a comment

>Technology doesn’t like me. Back at Cornell, I once managed to destroy both of our departmental copiers. And I did it twice. And it all happened in the space of an hour. So I was not very surprised to discover that over the winter holidays the hard drive of my work computer had “melted” (according to our IT specialist) for no apparent reason. I requested a new computer (which I am owed as per the conditions of my employment). The IT person reformatted the part of the hard drive that hadn’t melted, instead. Needless to say, it took the computer less than a week to stop functioning.

After I reported this disaster, it took the IT person until the day before yesterday to walk to my office with a new computer. Everybody knows that IT people have a tendency to get distracted very easily. Still, he did install a new, out-of-the-box computer on Wednesday. The next day (which ws yesterday) I came to work 2 hours early in order to prepare my classes for next week. My goal was to get all the work out of the way and have an uninterrupted 4-day-long weekend. When I came to work, however, I discovered that my “new” computer was dead.

Not only was I annoyed, I was also very bored. There is really nothing to do on campus at 7:30 in the morning if you have no computer.

When the IT person finally showed up, he started reinstalling (or whatever, I’m not good with the terminology) the computer. When I came to my office after teaching all my classes, I discovered that the computer was, indeed, working. The only problem was that something happened to the screen resolution and after five minutes of working on the computer I was on the verge of going insane. It turns out that the IT person connected a wrong monitor to this computer. How he thought I would be able to work on it is beyond me. We all know, however, that IT people have very weird ways of thinking about things.

Now he tells me that when I come back to work on Tuesday the computer will be in a working condition. Yeah, right. I’m so not going to work without bringing my own computer.

P.S. My home laptop also started acting up. But I think I managed to repair it. I won’t go into the endless story of how long and painful the process was but it kind of seems like it worked. I feel very proud of myself. Maybe now I should take the job of installing my office computer into my own hands.