I was reading an article about the latest in the Future–this time saying that the Personal Computer Age is over, and the age of the Mobile Devices has come. That is to say, the future, according to this article, is with Iphones and Ipads and maybe Google’s fast-rising Android.
All the little colorful devices with their Apps and the fast moving thumbs sending notes around the world like freed-up school kids from my childhood. Snapping pictures, finding out if there’s traffic on the freeway, what’s the weather, where is the nearest public restroom, let me make a reservation at a restaurant, buy a book get the news.
I started feeling sidelined, at best, with my small but clunky cell phone with a piece of plastic broken off, and all it does is take and make calls.
Another article asked, Will the I-Pad replace the PC?
And the answer was an intriguing one: Yes, for consumers, No for creators.
Some of my confidence came back. I have, in fact, been using a compute for more than a quarter of a century. I was sold, completely and totally, when my brother-in-law told me I would never have to retype again. I hated to retype. I had left things in articles and stories that I would have changed otherwise if it hadn’t meant typing up a whole fresh copy of the manuscript. So I got the earliest computer I could, a portable sewing machine sized Kaypro rival called Zorba. I learned the ridiculous, arbitrary code of Word Star. It only took two or three 5 and a quarter floppy disks to hold a whole novel! It was a miracle.
It really was a miracle, too. I had no interest in learning to program, and the world of bulletin boards and chat that some of our friends’ teenage sons were involved in didn’t interest me. In fact, I refused a color monitor fo r several years, wanting to keep the computer as a no-retyping machine. Email caught my attention, though, and then, in rapid succession, all the riches for research of the internet.
I now even keep websites and blog, and, with some reluctance, shop on the internet as well. I own a little netbook for taking to the city with me, and I never use the yellow pages anymore or, really the phone book. Like all of us, I have moved a great deal of my life online. The struggle for me, though, is to keep separate the world of consuming that even the PC thrusts at you (forget the little mobile devices) and the world of making and expressing.