It’s a good thing we only end decades every ten years. The endless round of “looking back at the decade” stories inflicted on us takes a good chunk of the joy out of the new year.
Of course, this past ten years has been a time of massive changes, socially and politically and, of course, technologically.
Huffpo ran a list earlier this week of the “12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade“. And it’s a mixed bag of good and bad news.
I won’t quote the Huffpo piece – you can click the link for all of the giggly, not-one-degree-behind-the-vacuous-trend-curve snarkiness you could want. But the list itself is interesting, more or less:
Calling (onthe phone): The text message, they say, is replacing the phone call. Huge net loss. Unless you’re stuck in a meeting, text messaging sucks chunks through a straw. It’s slow (yeah, yeah, I know, kids today can text 200 wpm, but I guarantee you we can all talk even faster), it degrades language, and in the end it dehumanizes us all; it’s such a natural progression on the way to Duckspeak, I’m amazed nobody else has brought it up. Verdict: Unambiguously Bad.
Classifieds: I’ll cop to it; I jumped on the Craigs List bandwagon with both feet. Sorry, newspapers; technology wins. The buyer needs to beware, but no moreso than with classifieds – and you can at least read Craigslist (and Twin Cities Free Market) without a magnifying glass. Verdict: Acceptable.
Dial-up Internet: Creaky? Unreliable? Begone. Verdict: Unambiguously good.
Encyclopedias: Yeah, I know, Google is fast and ubiquitous and everywhere. And the various online encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, have pretty much slurped up the market. But we’re raising a generation of kids who have absolutely no idea how to find information that doesn’t respond to a three word search string. In a generation, the art and skill of finding information that isn’t parsed, indexed and Google-ready will be even more concentrated in the hands of the very, very few (I’m talking lawyers, here) than it already is. Verdict: Neutral-to-bad.
CDs: I hated CDs when they came out. Compared to well-cared-for-vinyl, CDs – especially DDD CDs (material that was recorded, mastered and delivered digitally) sounded cold, harsh and teutonic. I’m not alone in thinking this; one of the big stories this past year or two in music technology has been the comeback of vinyl, with its warm, human-sounding frequency response. And I still want to find all those bobbleheads from the eighties who were saying “CDs are indestructible, and they will never skip!”; on the balance, I have found CDs to be much, much less reliable than well-cared-for vinyl. And I’m no audiophile (although as I buy more classical music, I could easily become one); for casual music listening, the MP3 is just fine. Verdict: Good riddance.
Landline Phones: As little as I like text messaging, I like cell phones even less. Why? Because you’re always “on” when you have a cell phone; you have to make a considered action to drop off the grid. And worst of all, cell phones are small, usually dark-colored, and easily lost. You can not lose a landline phone. After my little fracas with the garage last summer – where I had to race downstairs to try to find my cell phone, which it took me a second or two to remember I’d left in the handlebar-bag on my bike – I reaffirmed my belief; people need landlines. Verdict: A cursed wolf in blessing-y sheep’s clothing.
Film: The film camera, in theory, is similar to the CD. Digital cameras – at least, the ones I will ever be able to afford – are basically scanners. They sweep their field of view for the data in their response range, and plunk it, according to an automagic algorithm, into memory. It has none of the warmth or idiosyncrasy of film, the use of which is itself an art form. My daughter – who inherited the family photography gene, and is quite talented at the art of composing and lighting a shot – vastly prefers good old film for doing real photography, in the same way that I love analog music. But who am I kidding? If I remembered to take film to the store to be developed, it was a minor miracle. The digital camera fills the niche of the old 110 cameras, without the whole ‘pick up the film” hasslte. Verdict: Ambiguously good with a big asterisk.
Yellow Pages: I always hated trying to parse the phone company’s logic in parsing and sorting the content in the Yellow Pages. Verdict: Unalloyed Blessing.
Catalogs: I never read catalogs. Verdict: Who cares.
Fax Machines: I hated, hated, hated fax machines. Always. Fussy, temperamental, slow, with an action-to-feedback loop an order of magnitude beyond the attention span I devote t o “sending documents”, I learned to detest the buzzing, beeping, paper-shredding, hidden-code-dependent monstrosities. Especially when I was working as a contractor; I’d fax my invoices to whomever was collecting them, and run about my business, and find out a day later that something, somewhere in the chain, had squibbed, leaving me scrambling to make sure I got paid on time…Grrr. Hate ’em. Verdict: Yaaaay!
Wires: Wires, they say, are obsolete. Wireless will replace it all, they say. But after six years of wrestling with anomalous propagation, signal quirks and hardware and user-interface bumfuzzlery, I’m very, very unconvinced. And you just know the Center for Science in the Public Interest is going to find that wireless causes cancer, don’t you? Verdict: Get back to me in ten years, trekkie.
Hand-written letters: Ugh. There’s something so nice about a hand-written letter. Unless it’s from me. Between my ADD and decades of bad habits ranges from an unintelligible scrawl to, if I’m paying attention, a painfully slow all-cap script that looks like it was written by an addled first-grader. On the other hand, I type 70 WPM, and still do it with style. Verdict: I’m so sorry, but I’m totally there.
Thoughts are solicited.
Reading the part about CD’s was like taking a trip to bizarro-world. Maybe you’d like a hand-cranked gramaphone so you can enjoy its “more human frequency response”?
Dunno about catalogs being dead; I certainly hope not, since I write catalog copy for a living. Things are moving to the web and it is likely inexorable, but as long as men are visiting what Archie Bunker used to call “the library,” there will be a market for catalogs and other periodicals.
Agree with most, but one big exception. Film. Digital is 100 times better to use, but will your great great great grandkids have any photos of you 120 years from now? Will your grandkids have any photos of you 70 years from now?
No mention of newspapers or peep shows?
If I may have a moment of your time I would like to speak in defense of the text message. I love them, for two reasons. First, we can all agree that cell phones are here to stay, but the transition has been messy enough to lead to an influx of very public phone conversations that should NOT be held in public. The text message offers the level of discretion needed in a wireless world. Second, it cuts out ten minutes of useless drivel following the simple communication to let them know where they will see me shortly and give us something to talk about once we are actually face to face.
Being a grammar geek I make a point to use real English in all of my text messages and I condemn any practice to the contrary. I blame the instant message on the Iminent Decline of Western Society in that regard (and Michele Bachmann, of course because she is Teh CrayZ), not the text message. After all, if I wanted to slap some random drivel together to make myself feel validated and important with blatant disregard to the bastions of grammar and decency, I’d comment on SID.
Cell phones: you can be “off” if you simply turn it off. That’s what voicemail is for. If I WANT to be “off”, my considered action is ‘pull it out of the pocket, hold down the power button for 3 seconds, put it back in the pocket’. A small price to pay for having the convenience of not having to go home, or find a payphone and a quarter if I need to make a call.
Pagers, on the other hand, are the tool of the devil for that exact same reason. You have to go FIND a phone if you get a page, and the vast majority of pages that are sent, are sent EXPECTING a timely response (on call network administrators, medical personnel, etc)
Personally, I doubt I’ve got enough hearing left to tell the difference between CD and vinyl. There were many many years between last having access to a GOOD record player and my first CD player. I grew up on cassettes. Maybe if I knew someone who had a 5 figure home theater with a record player, I might be able to tell a difference. An audiophile acquaintance of mine detests MP3s and ripped his entire 400+ cd collection to .wav file several years ago, because even at 320Kbits, MP3s are still compressed. This is a guy who paid $80 per foot for his speaker cables in about 2003.
Unfortunately for him, the idiot stored it on a Win98 box and when the FAT32 table crapped out, he had to repeat the process, taking a few weeks. We gave him much well deserved shit for that, especially since he is as fluent in *NIX as he is in Windows and could have built a cheap linux box to store it on
I’ve got a Google Voice account. Very cool. They give you your own phone number (Mine has 651 area code, Scandia, I think). All voice calls IM’s, etc, that are sent to this account are forwarded to your home or cell #. If you don’t answer a voice call, the message is recorded, automatically transcribed (with mixed results) and emailed to your gmail account. If you want to hear the message instead of reading the transcribed version, you click on a link & the recorded message is played via a flash tool.
If you have a headset you can make calls directly from your computer, like Skype, but from a *free* persistent phone #.
One really good thing about CDs is that most are DRM free. DRM is for suckers. 🙂
Wireless is nice, but wires will never be obsolete.
Maybe you’d like a hand-cranked gramaphone so you can enjoy its “more human frequency response”?
Isn’t that like saying “If you like Hawaii, maybe you’d like Midway Island even more!”?
Nope. Just a good turntable. That’d be fine, thanks.
“…will be even more concentrated in the hands of the very, very few (I’m talking lawyers, here)”
From my perspective, that’s a feature, not a bug.
“From my perspective, that’s a feature, not a bug.”
I know! And in about 20 years, society will go “we allowed WHAT to happen?”
“Wireless is nice, but wires will never be obsolete.”
Just after ordering a book for my wife’s Kindle, from my Droid, I had to stop the dog from eating the Christmas tree lights. Yes, wires will always be with us.
Digital vs Analog music – unless you fork out very serious bucks, you’ll be extremely hard pressed to tell a difference between a CD player and Turntable hooked up to the same Pre/Amp/Speaker set up. You should visit all 3 floors at the Venetian at CES to see how incredible digital can sound. Want me to bring you back some brochures of $100,000++ speakers, pre/amps, CD Transports and DACs?
Same goes for film vs digital camera. Get your daughter a Canon EOS (non-Rebel) and RAW editing software, and she will forget how to spell “film”. When Hasselblad converted from film to digital, film officially died. Bury the asterisk – you are plain wrong.
And Chuck, you can still print digital photos. .jpg files are just a digital form of exposed film. And if you store and back up your .jpgs properly, if something ever happened to your printed photographs, you can always print another set – in exact same quality as the original. Can you do the same with film? Even if you could find it?
I have rarely looked up information in an encyclopedia. I have read them for fun, but there’s always a better source than World Book if you’re doing research. Now, if magazine publication goes away …
Wires aren’t obsolete. They may be in the next ten years, but someone jumped the gun on that proclamation. And I still have to use a Fax machine for medical reimbursement, for a reason that is hidden to me at this time (but I will get to the bottom of it).
Of course, I remember when the Postal Service was rendered obsolete by e-mail. Those were the good old days.
“Nope. Just a good turntable. That’d be fine, thanks.”
That would be a turntable that is always rotating at the same speed & radial bias that the master was recorded with. Plus an arm that has no momentum. Also the needle should be infinitely sharp.
Really, Mitch, consumer technology is delivered as best technology for the best cost at the time. LP’s may sound different than CD’s, but not ‘better’. If you really want the LP sound, you can get a lossless recording of a thousand dollar turntable recorded on a CD or DVD at 192kHz or 384 Khz or whatever and listen to it on your car sound system.
Listen to me. Do not buy the equivalent of $80/ft Monster cables. REO is not worth it.
Expensive personal computers for household or small business use – word processing, checkbook, e-mail. Time was, you’d pay $1,000 for a PC, back when that was real money and the product was real crap.
Now you can buy a much faster machine with tons more memory for $250.
Mostly good.
Nate:
I used to be friends with a guy who had a personal policy of taking a $4K loan out every three years and buying the most powerhouse PC he could get his hands on. This was in the early to mid 90s, when “powerhouse” meant a P200 with 64 megs of ram, a 1 gig hd, and a 19″ CRT dual booting NT3.51 or 4.0 and Win95 or 98 Oh, and of course 2 Diamond Monster 3D cards SLI’d together, since gaming was as critical as database work for him.
Stooj:
World Book? I remember those from my school days (daze?) as being the cheaper “K-Mart level” encyclopedia with more pictures. If you wanted to REALLY get the most detailed information, you had to go to the REAL encyclopedia: Encyclopædia Britannica.
Nate/Bill: I remember buying my first new computer, in ’95 (with the severance check from a gig that had laid me off about a day before I was going to give notice to go to a job that paid about 60% more!). The machine itself (a Pentium 100 with 64megs, a 1 gig HD) was around $1,500; the NEC 17″ monitor was close to $900 more.
Mostly good indeed.
In ’83 I borrowed $1500 to buy a Heath Zenith CPM machine with DUAL floppy drives. I bought it used from my brother who worked for Heath, and built it from a kit. He was the designer of the Z-100 computer that could duel boot either CPM or HDOS.
I remember my first 1 gig Seagate HD, paid $190 for it (when I was still unmarried and had that kind of disposable cash to fritter away on toys).
I also remember my (future) wife worked at a computer consulting company called Connect from 94-95. They were going to train her in Lotus Notes (3.51!) and wanted her to upgrade her home computer to Win95 from Win3.11. To do this, she had to upgrade her 4 megs of ram to 8 megs. She bought a 4 meg SIMM from work for $180.
Bill C – Brittanica, that’s the one. I couldn’t remember the really good one. Again, I was taught that encyclopaedia were not primary resources, and not the best choice for research.