Monday, September 2, 2013

reactions to technology

a friend pointed me to yet another great douglas adams quote, which rang very true as i tried to help my mom learn how to use her smart phone this weekend!

I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies: 
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 
2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 
3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

6 comments:

Big Mark 243 said...

that is sooo true..!

heroineworshipper said...

It certainly feels like user interfaces followed that trend. Modern touch interfaces rely on rote memorization of symbols: 3 dots connected by lines means share, 3 lines means menu, a gear means settings, a flag means inappropriate content. It's very convoluted & arcane compared to the pulldown menus & tool tips of childhood.

Dr. Alfonso Barnechea said...

I hope I still see new things as "new and exciting" after 36!

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Charlie said...

You linked to it, but this one is my favorite of his:

“The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.”

David Evans said...

I'm totally hooked on Web search engines (which arrived when I was about 55) and video games (ditto). They are part of my world.