12 Things That Became Obsolete This Decade<\/a>“.\u00a0\u00a0And it’s a mixed bag of good and bad news.\u00a0<\/p>\nI 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.\u00a0 But the list itself is interesting, more or less:<\/p>\n
Calling (onthe phone)<\/strong>:\u00a0 The text message, they say, is replacing the phone call.\u00a0 Huge <\/em>net loss.\u00a0 Unless you’re stuck in a meeting, text messaging sucks chunks through a straw.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Verdict: Unambiguously Bad.<\/strong><\/p>\nClassifieds:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I’ll cop to it; I jumped on the Craigs List bandwagon with both feet.\u00a0 Sorry, newspapers; technology wins.\u00a0 The buyer needs to beware, but no moreso than with\u00a0classifieds – and\u00a0you can at least read Craigslist (and Twin Cities Free Market) without a magnifying glass.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Verdict: Acceptable.<\/strong><\/p>\nDial-up Internet<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Creaky?\u00a0 Unreliable?\u00a0 Begone.\u00a0 Verdict: Unambiguously good.<\/strong><\/p>\nEncyclopedias<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Yeah, I know, Google is fast and ubiquitous and everywhere.\u00a0 And the various online encyclopedias, including Wikipedia, have pretty much slurped up the market.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Verdict: Neutral-to-bad.<\/strong><\/p>\nCDs<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I hated CDs when they came out.\u00a0 Compared to well-cared-for-vinyl, CDs – especially DDD CDs (material that was recorded, mastered and delivered digitally) sounded cold, harsh and teutonic.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 And I’m no audiophile (although\u00a0as I buy\u00a0more classical music, I could easily become one); for casual music listening, the MP3 is just fine.\u00a0Verdict: Good riddance.<\/strong><\/p>\nLandline Phones<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0As little as I like text messaging, I like cell phones even less. Why?\u00a0 Because you’re always “on” when you have a cell phone; you have to make a considered action to drop off the grid.\u00a0 And worst of all, cell phones are small, usually dark-colored, and easily lost.\u00a0 You can not <\/em>lose a landline phone.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Verdict: A cursed wolf in blessing-y sheep’s clothing.<\/strong><\/p>\nFilm<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0The film camera, in theory, is similar to the CD.\u00a0 Digital cameras – at least, the ones I will ever be able to afford – are basically scanners.\u00a0 They sweep their field of view for the data in their response range, and plunk it, according to an automagic algorithm, into memory.\u00a0 It has none of the warmth or idiosyncrasy of film, the use of which is itself an art form.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 But who am I kidding?\u00a0 If I remembered to take film to the store to be developed, it was a minor miracle.\u00a0 The digital camera fills the niche of the old 110 cameras, without the whole ‘pick up the film” hasslte.\u00a0 Verdict: Ambiguously good with a big asterisk.<\/strong><\/p>\nYellow Pages<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I always hated trying to parse the phone company’s logic in parsing and sorting the content in the Yellow Pages.\u00a0 Verdict: Unalloyed Blessing.<\/strong><\/p>\nCatalogs<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I never read catalogs.\u00a0 Verdict: Who cares.<\/strong><\/p>\nFax Machines<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0I hated, hated, hated fax machines.\u00a0 Always.\u00a0 Fussy, temperamental, slow, with an action-to-feedback loop an order of magnitude beyond the attention span \u00a0I devote t o “sending documents”, I learned to detest the buzzing, beeping, paper-shredding, hidden-code-dependent monstrosities.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Hate ’em.\u00a0 Verdict: Yaaaay!<\/strong><\/p>\nWires<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Wires, they say, are obsolete.\u00a0 Wireless will replace it all, they say.\u00a0 But after six years of wrestling with anomalous propagation, signal quirks and hardware and user-interface bumfuzzlery, I’m very, very unconvinced.\u00a0 And you just know<\/em>\u00a0 the Center for Science in the Public Interest is going to find that wireless causes cancer,\u00a0don’t you?\u00a0 Verdict: Get back to me in ten years, trekkie.<\/strong><\/p>\nHand-written letters<\/strong>:\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Ugh.\u00a0 There’s something so nice about a hand-written letter.\u00a0 Unless it’s from me.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 On the other hand, I type 70 WPM, and still do it with style.\u00a0 Verdict: I’m so sorry, but I’m totally there.<\/strong><\/p>\nThoughts are solicited.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
It’s a good thing we only end decades every ten years.\u00a0\u00a0 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\u00a0 years has been a time of massive changes, socially and politically and, of course, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7526","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7526"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7586,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7526\/revisions\/7586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}