I find myself in agreement with a Young Male Columnist
Bluuuuuue Moooooon, you saw me standing alooooone....
No, really, quite a bit of what young Mr Heritage says is remarkably sensible: I am just starting to realise, as others are, that everything doesn’t have to do everything. It is much more preferable to have something that can do one thing well.
Sing it. As someone who is obliged more often than she likes to wrestle with 'Discovery' on The National Archives website: instead of ARCHON to find contact details for specific repositories, NRA to find what's held at places other than TNA, and their own catalogue (which was, I will concede, getting dumbder and dumbderd down each time I visited it) for things Wot Might Be in TNA you have this utterly confusing and annoying single search box.
Yes, your handy Swiss Army Knife may stand you in good stead for emergencies, but in ordinary circumstances, I think one might prefer full-size, dedicated tools for the job at hand (unless, of course, you are the kind of person from the joke the punchline of which is 'seven, and before you ask, standing up in a hammock').
I also like that he isn't all WOEZ TEKNOLOGEEE and proposing going on a fast and communicating with his friends by semaphore or carrier pigeon. Technology is still brilliant, and completely necessary. If I didn’t have a map of the entire world inside my phone all the time, there’s a fairly reasonable chance that I would still be fruitlessly wandering around continental Europe, starved and frothing because I couldn’t find my way back to the hotel that I had checked into somewhere in the middle of 2012. If I couldn’t look up recipes from my phone, I guarantee that I would be dead from excessive oven-chip consumption by now. Try to part me from my phone, and I would probably have quite an ugly tantrum in front of you.
But when you get to the point, as I did recently, where you are buying lightbulbs that can only be switched on and off from your phone, it is time for an intervention. Things like that - and smartwatches, and everything else - sound cool, but they just end up making things more complicated than they need to be. You can do without them.
This is also the feeling one gets when one is obliged to upgrade something that perfectly well serves one's purposes as it is and finding that new version is not intuitive and comes with unnecessary bells and whistles. (It is also the feeling I get when I see all the things that there are apps for...) This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2211663.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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