SELVATICI

I created this blog just a few months ago and I already had to update three Wordpress releases, to install new versions of six plug-in and to configure the site in technical challenging ways to have it all working. Having being out of the programming world myself for years, I have been helped by Matteo, more technically prepared than me and creator of Babel for the multilingual capabilities of a blog.

A blog requires to be updated not only in terms of new articles, but, too, in the features needed to exchange information with other sites, in his technical and communicative possibilities, in the visitor analysis, in the promotional aspects and so on. It is in the nature of every technology, blogs included, to expand their possibilities and to produce new versions of themselves. I am quite an attentive user of technologies but I am not so product oriented. In some fields I am quite backwards. For instance, I don’t own a television, I don’t have a DVD player (apart from the one on my laptop), my Hi-Fi system is 12 years old, I’m not interested in videogames, I don’t own a car navigator or even a camcorder.
I own a smartphone that can access the Internet and play music, a laptop (with printer, webcam, ADSL and loudspeakers, an “old” 5.0 Megapixel digital camera, an MP3 player and other small gimmickry that are mostly unused.

But technologies become old quickly. A laser printer that still works perfectly can’t be used with my new laptop because there isn’t a parallel port and there are also problems with the drivers. Same untimely death for a laptop that doesn’t have a sufficient amount of resources to manage a fast Internet connection and the new versions of browsers, antivirus and other software, ever more memory greedy. So I can only use the last generation technologies and, even in this case, making my few devices communicate between one another often requires a certain amount of work and, again, the updating of different programs. With technologies it is enough to divert your attention for a while and you run the risk that nothing works anymore.

Without a doubt where we can find that the most frequent updates are in the software field. An average user browse the Internet, manages photo pictures, communicates through emails and with instant messaging systems, takes part in social networking sites, manages his online bank account, purchases books or technologies, often manages his job and clients communications online. Furthermore, many people have a web site or a blog for their job.

Every online activity requires the user to work with several softwares that have to match one another. A simple activity as managing an online photo albums requires the use of the camera software, another specific software for image processing, a fast Internet connection, at least a browser and a site that can host the image, and eventually a printer to get a paper copy of the  photos. This just to say the least, hoping in the meanwhile that there won’t be incompatibilities between the various hardware/software components.

From time to time, digital cameras have to be bought brand new to “keep up with the times” in terms of image quality, filters, compatibility with other technologies and new features. At the same time, image processing softwares are being updated and developed. In all of this working on the computer, most likely the time spent and the cost of a single picture (considering the hardware obsolescence as well) is much more than the traditional photography where one was sending the roll to develop in order to put them later in an album.

The old grandmother photos on paper can be touched and seen even now; the loss of quality is natural as grandma’s wrinkles are. Paper, once an alive tree, undergoes a natural organic deterioration process as any other thing. The time marks bring us back to the times.

With digital technology the images of today will be hardly accessible trough technologies that will be available in a relatively short time as the next ten years. Sometimes there are even compatibility problems between digital cameras and image processing software of the last generation. I am not a graphic but my graphic friends tell me that the interoperabilities and the compatibilities are often just theoretical. In ten years time the Internet sites where we can share images will be purchased, closed, transformed or merged. Our old computer where we stored images will have another standard of storing and data transmission. If we will be able to access images, online or on the old computer, those will be required to be ported to memory supports different from the present-day ones, converted to different graphical formats (but will the concept of “format” still be there?) and who knows what else. In the meanwhile, grandma’s photos will still be there, perhaps just a bit more seasoned.

Nonetheless, with digital technology, differently from the past, our friends that live in any other part of the world will be able to look at our pictures through a web site from their home computer. But I regret the nights when we used to meet between friends after travelling to look at pictures or slides, listening to the people who shot them and the guests comments. Somebody could object that still now we can invite friends at home and look at the digital pictures over a screen, but given the easiness to send by email just a web address where pictures are stored, those meetings rarely happen anymore. Also there’s no expectation of meeting friends to look at pictures, listening to the still fresh feelings of the travel in first person and good glasses of wine too. Now perhaps some Web 2.0 genius will design an online conference system where a user will be able to comment live his pictures to the guests… but still will be far from a personal meeting experience.

Furthermore, given the ease in producing pictures, everybody shots and owns a large number of them so the attention span we can give to any of them is less and less. On the musical level there are similar tendencies, where we find the hyper-production of low quality music through digital technologies, with little human contacts. Elton John’s  paradoxical provocation in summer 2007, when he said that would be better to close the Internet for five years to come back to creativity, has to be read in the sense of coming back to musical jam sessions. Anyhow, I would prefer to read such a statement from somebody that has been active on the Net for at least five years.

Coming back on the technology obsolescence brings me to consider software and hardware updating. I don’t want to bite the hand that fed me for years. I have been a computer science book publisher through Apogeo in Italy, so any new software version was a chance for our market. Though, as soon as the economical possibilities of the company allowed us, we joined other series about reflecting and deep analysis about technology and media to the technical books, assuming that technology without awareness is of little use.

But if a few years ago the average computer user was using a limited set of software and web sites, the ongoing digitalization of our life brought an expansion of technologies that need our attention and time. Our job, personal finance and social contacts depend more and more on the Internet. Just the people who work in the technical fields can use the ever expanding time needed to be up to date in an effective way. Everybody else has to stay behind or would be otherwise bound to use the majority of their time doing technological updates and resolving the connected problems, taking away time from social contacts.

The risk is a sort of cyberenslavement where people will be bound to continuously update their technologies and expand the range of use of those. There are mechanisms created where it becomes indispensable, needful and fashionable to have the last technology.

The right to non-information, to non-update and to silence will be a privilege in the future and one of the important signals of life quality. Who will have the possibility to avoid overloading their mind with the collective technological rushes and will avoid updating software in a sort of forced technological consumerism, will be privileged.

In these years we are having information indigestion as after the postwar period people consumed an excessive amount of food. To be overweight was a status symbol in societies that lived food scarcity, while once food becomes available to every social class, being overweight becomes a sign of low health and non self caring.

Likewise, in the future the information greed and the excessive use of technologies will be considered as symptoms of a mind that can’t discriminate, synthesize and mostly stay in silence. We will get an information dietology.

For a long time we correctly looked for thought and speech freedom, now we need the non-thought freedom and the right to silence.

See also:

Multitasking to nothing

Biotech as an information system

Virtual worlds, mirror worlds, Second Life: backing up the messed planet

Mechanisms, mysticism and Amazon Mechanical Turk

Zen archery and computers

Lifelogging

The heart of the binary code

Downloading our life on Internet

Google, privacy and the need to be seen

Personal consumer

Il incorrersi degli aggiornamenti tecnologici sia software che  hardware, la fatica e il tempo necessari solo per capire come funziona un sito, per non parlare di come funziona un wiki o un portale mi stanno facendo perdere la voglia di “migliorare” i piccoli progetti comunicativi che avevamo progettato sia per noi, che per il C.I.R e la Rete Bioregionale. Ieri, tornando con l’autobus verso casa ho fatto l’interessante lettura di un articolo sulla rivista Ellin Selae: Aggiornamenti tecnologici e diritto al silenzio di Ivo Quartiroli. Ho cercato il blog e sono rimasto affascinato dagli scritti. Vi ripropongo il post (come tutto il blog sotto licenza Creative Commons) 

Ho creato questo blog: http://www.indranet.org/ , solo da pochi mesi e mi sono già trovato a dover aggiornare tre versioni di Wordpress, ad installare le nuove versioni di sei plug-in e a configurare il sito in modi tecnicamente non immediati per far funzionare il tutto. Essendo fuori da anni dal mondo della programmazione, a un certo punto sono stato aiutato da Matteo, tecnicamente più esperto di me e creatore di Babel per la gestione degli articoli multilingua.