Technology Is Only Technology if You Didn't Grow Up With It

Jenny, a self-professed “information maven” writes a blog called “the Shifted Librarian.” and it’s good reading. In a post about commerical trends and the Internet, and how those trends might relate to libraries, she quotes an interesing passage from Douglas Adams .

Because 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.’ "

I’m glad I found “The Shifted Librarian” . I’m trying to make a change in what kinds of blogs I read these days. Right now, the list of blogs that I follow is absolutely crammed full of design blogs, partially a function of the fact that designers are most likely to publish the feeds in the first place – but I’m not really all that interested in design. Or, at least, I try not to be.