Thursday, October 14, 2004

Good To Remember 

Technology is only technology if you didn't grow up with it:

"Another problem with the net is that it's still 'technology', and 'technology', as the computer scientist Bran Ferren memorably defined it, is 'stuff that doesn't work yet.' We no longer think of chairs as technology, we just think of them as chairs. But there was a time when we hadn't worked out how many legs chairs should have, how tall they should be, and they would often 'crash' when we tried to use them. Before long, computers will be as trivial and plentiful as chairs (and a couple of decades or so after that, as sheets of paper or grains of sand) and we will cease to be aware of the things. In fact I'm sure we will look back on this last decade and wonder how we could ever have mistaken what we were doing with them for 'productivity.' " - Douglas Adams, 1999

Cut shamelessly from The Shifted Librarian's very interesting discussion about how students tend to underreport their internet use because they don't think of email and IM as Internet use. And also because this quote should always live on my desktop, right next to that Arthur C. Clarke quote ("any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic").

posted by boyhowdy | 9:53 PM |

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