Want to stop “living in the past?”
I received an interesting list of questions tonight, from a fellow artist for whom I agreed to do an interview. The questions got me thinking about “tools” and the products of the creative mind (which are usually quite independent of those tools). It probably helped me in my thinking that I spent 2 hours today watching the Kenote address of the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference. Those two hours got me thinking about tools, how we use them, how some people think of tools as an end in themselves, and how some people make the CONSCIOUS CHOICE to “live in the past.”
Frankly, you should watch the Keynote, too!
No, you don’t have to be a “technodweeb” or a “gadget geek.” Please stay awake during the technobabble (some of us LOVE that stuff!) so that you don’t miss out on the social revolution that is happening! 
Some of the points of the Keynote that were fascinating to me were that: the number of Macintosh users has TRIPLED in the last 5 years, the latest MacBook Pro (with “Retina Display”) has the highest resolution of any computer display, that the latest MacBook Pro uses EXCLUSIVELY very fast “flash memory,” and that the very-well-thought-out Apple ecosystem is in “full swing…” even the concept of doing presentations at customer sites by taking only your Mac laptop and Apple TV. The logical conclusions of some of the iOS 6 features are as obvious as they are socially unsettling.
A long time ago, one of my coworkers, during a discussion of running Windows applications in what was then “emulation” on the Mac, asked me, “Why would you want to pollute your Mac?” At the time, I did not think about her comment sufficiently.
Anymore, one of the first recommendations that I would give a person suffering a lot of computer problems would be to get a Mac and then call me. When I worked at VeriSign, I saw some of the problems that even an EXTRAORDINARILY COMPETENT company can have when running a Windows environment. Later, after I left, I read that hackers (“crackers,” really) REPEATEDLY STOLE undisclosed information from VeriSign in 2010, incursions that were not described to the outside by VeriSign until 2011 and which were not publicly released until February 2, 2012! Of course, the attack on VeriSign was reminiscent of another cyberattack on another security organization, RSA.
TWO of the things that keep us “living in the past” are: ignorance and denial.
Fortunately, we can do something about ignorance, at least those of us with open minds! 😉
Denial, on the other hand, is a comparatively common “mental mechanism” that some people employ to protect their comfortable, if grossly distorted, view of the world. Ask me. Even high tech is FULL of them.
Dispel your ignorance! Watch all 2 hours of the WWDC Keynote. Discover the REAL “state of the art” and learn what true visionaries are doing.
I know. The technology, which ALWAYS leaves society running to catch up, leaves a lot of very important questions unanswered: privacy issues, basic constitutional rights, safety issues.
Technology is not at fault. It is just a “tool.” PEOPLE choose to use technology for good or evil, as they have done their entire existence.
-Bill at
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