As far as wannabe web designers are concerned I have always been more reluctant to take on new technologies. For example, in 1999 when my parents bought a computer with a built in DVD player (a Pentium III 550Mhz, those were the days), I was initially really impressed with it and decided to start buying DVDs, but soon went back to VHS when just because we didn’t have a player hooked up to a decent television, and the things cost too much.
Now we have eleven in the house.
The same applied when it came to upgrading from Windows 2000 to Windows XP. It cost too much money, it was buggy, and I was scared of change. Eventually, I have become used to it.
Last month I jumped in at the deepend. I bought myself my first laptop, or “Notebook” as you Americans call them, an IBM Thinkpad R50e. Then a wireless router to go with it. After I set it up I sat down and admired this nice little network I had going - pretending to myself that I was some kind of really on-the-ball kind of guy with my pro looking “notebook”, downloading all these very Web 2.0 type applications, suck as Flock, and adding SlashDot to my del.icio.us bookmarks.
The next week I went out and bought myself a Nikon D50 - abandoning all I had said about 35mm and medium format film being better than digital, and how digital is the death of photography, and how they are a waste of money. But it’s a good camera, it serves it’s purpose, and like all recent technologies, it need improvements.
But none of these advances have made life any better. Five years ago I could have networked all my computers with an ethernet router, some RJ45 plugs and some CAT5 cable. I could have watched any film on video - and I wouldn’t have had to worry about it getting scratched - and I could have put a bit of Selotape over that square and recorded over it if it was rubbish! And, thanks to Aristotle, photography has been around for thousands of years, and the camera as we know it has been around for a few hundred, and that technology did the job just fine.
So, that is where I stand on the issue; I think we should all embrace technology, but we need to be less obsessed with gadgets. As we go into 2006, a new year of digital temptation, I’d like to remind my readers that we survived perfectly fine without the ability to watch a movie on a 2.5″ screen on the way to work.
