I’ve always been a fan of new technology; I love being able to track and monitor both myself and the world around me in more ways than ever before. I have a smart watch, a smart phone and a multitude of other devices that I regularly use. I’ve also been intrigued by the levels of integration that has been achieved over the last five to ten years. I love new technology so much that you’re probably thinking I have nothing bad to say about it, but sadly, that’s not true.
So, what’s my Beef? Well it isn’t how reliant people are on technology, that’s the way of things and if you bury your head in the sand and try to ignore it, you’ll end up with so much sand in your ears that you wont hear the train of progress coming and it’ll bowl you over. I’m also not talking about how certain elements of technology (primarily social media) have become the route of all evil and is slowly allowing intelligence to be breed out of the human race. To explain my beef, I need to use one of my favourite old school examples.; The Record Player. Yes, this humble and simple, yet limited, device is one of my favourites of all time. Why? Well because its simple, it works and when it stops or plays up, fixing it and getting back on track is the thing of a moment. Its design and purpose are simple, and it continues to deliver what its intended to deliver even to this day.
That’s the problem with modern technology, we all see the highly publicised releases of new technology, we all get sold the ease and simplicity of new technology and we all walk away with the expectation of the technology delivering on that promise. Yet for most of it, technology becomes more limiting as it advances. New Technology is designed to be simple, easy to use and fun. But the moment it stops working (generally after the very first update), things become frustrating and irritating.
It seems that once we take the lure and adopt the technology, it slowly but surely draws us down the rabbit hole of despair.
Take my “adventure” today, I had a simple goal of shooting a video that you can see here, giving it a simple edit and putting it up onto YouTube and IGTV. Shooting it was easy enough, although I need to do some more work on lighting. Editing it proved to be even more difficult, but thankfully the Google Oracle provided some guidance and I was soon free, and the video was done. But alas, what should be a relatively straight forward process of moving it from my Surface to my iPhone, turned out to be a migraine inducing shitstorm, adding several hours of misery so that I could transfer 13 minutes of video.
The end result is that I got the video up on YouTube (but not IGTV, thanks to its 10-minute time limit) but not without adding a flurry of grey hairs to my already substantial grey growth.
I’m not convinced that the technology will get better anytime soon, if anything, I think I’ll develop better ways of moving files around and become more organised, thus removing my dependence on technology. And maybe that’s a good thing, maybe technology is trying to unplug us, maybe it knows something we don’t….. or maybe I should stop watching the Matrix.
Either way, and at the end of the day, technology has its limitations. I think its time we use those limitations to our advantage and raise up against our machine overlords and reclaim our beef! Its food for thought anyway.
‘til next time….. Cheers.