A Dinosaur in the Electronics Shop; or, My First Blog Post

So I decided to start a blog. It sounds trivial, perhaps, to most people under the age of 60, but it was a huge step to me. Let me use this first post to elaborate on why.

Though I am only middle-aged – forty-something – I have always sympathized with the elderly who find it hard to keep up with latest technology. I feel kinship with people like the 17th century astronomer, Johannes Hevelius (1611–1687) who – as described by John Gribbin in his Science: A History – was so suspicious of the then relatively new technology of telescopes that he would still in the 1670s refuse to use them and rather used open sights observation instead:

“In a correspondence beginning in 1668, [Robert] Hooke implored him to switch to telescopic sights, but Hevelius stubbornly refused, claiming that he could do just as well with open sights. The truth is that Hevelius was simply too set in his ways to change and distrusted the new-fangled methods. He was like someone who persists in using an old-fashioned manual typewriter even though a modern word-processing computer is available.” (Gribbin 2002, 169.)

I know that feeling. I am never, ever among the first wave of people – pioneers and well-connected technology-enthusiasts – to adopt latest technology, among the people who actually create that technology or have access to prototypes and beta versions already. Nor am I in the second, or usually even in the third or fourth wave – I am no tech trend-setter, or quick to follow those trends, or eager to get my hands on recent stuff that some peer group thinks is cool. Actually, I am not even among the fifth; or maybe even the sixth wave of new technology adopters – those sensible, or parsimonious, or even somewhat over-cautious or miserly consumers who follow the lead of trendy people only a couple years later, when the new tech or some of its later modifications or updates is very old news already but perhaps about half cheaper than it originally was. To carry this – admittedly, pretty retarded – wave metaphor to the bitter end now, I am the guy carried to the shore on the seventh wave of new technology users, clutching to some old technology to keep me barely afloat, coughing up salty sea water from my lungs.

Not because I am old (old enough to remember the time without smartphones, even the time without the not-very-smart cellphones, the time without the Internet, or home computers in fact – they would only make their invasion to Finland in the 1980s, when I was a schoolkid), but because I was­ born old, in this respect. Another way to put it: I have a skeptical attitude toward all things novel, especially toward new technology. It is a matter of personality, I fear – I wouldn’t get high scores on “Openness to experience” in any Five-Factor personality test (see Wiggins ed. 1996). I am forever a pessimist about what the new technology will offer me; to me that glass is always half full of poison. (Sometimes I actually feel like taking some consolation from the inevitability of death: that one day I will no longer have to try and adapt to the ever-changing technological environment, get to lay my weary head to eternal rest, away from the toil and trouble.)

But now here’s the point I am trying make: I know that this is an unhealthy, indeed crappy attitude to have, and I am trying to fight it. I am well aware of the great potential that ICT and digitalization hold in education (see Kivinen, Piiroinen & Saikkonen 2016), for example; as well as in the entertainment industry, of course (I enjoy many digital era TV-series masterpieces like GoT very much, which would have been impossible to create twenty years ago); and more generally in the economy. I know it could be argued – though remains highly controversial and debatable at this point, and is beyond my capacities to evaluate with any confidence – that digitalization and automatization will bring exponential orders of magnitude more innovations and economic growth that will in the end benefit everybody (although, many experts would admit, in the short run tends to increase inequality, shrink the middle-class and widen the gap between a small elite of super-rich and the huge masses of miserable poor) (see, e.g., Brynjolfsson & McAfee 2011). So I am not saying that we should turn back the clock, back away from this post-industrial age of ours. And I am trying, trying so very hard to be more open-minded about new technology; in fact, every now and then I do take steps to learn to use some. And guess what: usually when I get down to it, try and learn it, it turns out to be a lot less difficult than I had imagined; the hardest part really was just to get going and start doing something about it.

For example, in the summer of 2013 I bought my first smartphone, an iPhone 5, which was actually quite a new model at the time, less than a year old (so I was, for once in my life, actually something like a third-waver in adopting that particular piece of technology), and I found it about as intuitively usable as people had been telling me. The device has since then enhanced my standard of living quite a bit, I think; me and my iPhone, we are inseparable now (except when I go swimming or play in a chess tournament where electronic devices are banned). I warmly recommend a smartphone to anyone who still doesn’t own one. (This was not a paid commercial; unfortunately.)

Other great personal success stories include learning how to use TV’s remote control (we didn’t have one in my childhood home until a couple years into the 1980s, for in the 70s we still only had a remote-less black-and-white TV); writing my first email in the 90s at the tender age of 22; getting internet access to my home some ten years ago; and then learning how to use online bank services so that I could finally stop queueing in the physical bank office every other week to pay my bills.

Hooray for me! But I still have some way to go; here is a short list of some of the things that I still haven’t done once in my life:

• Established a YouTube account (although I do watch videos on YouTube, duh).
• Used Spotify.
• Used Instagram.
• Edited (with any kind of success) any video on a computer.
• Subscribed to Netflix or other such paid streaming services to watch movies or television (although I have used some similar services that are included in my cable-TV package).
• Played computer games online with people I didn’t know (with or without those headset thingies that I see them wear)
• Used Skype
• Used Snapchat, or had any other live discussions online (except through Facebook / Messenger, which I do use – like my mother and millions of other senior citizens)
• Used almost any single smartphone application currently fashionable among sub-20-year-olds; no, better make that sub-30-year-olds
• Done any programming (to me, programming looks as mysterious and incomprehensible as, for example, the playing of a piano concerto looks to an utterly unmusical person (which, as it happens, I also am)).

Anyways, here goes one thing off that list; off the bucket list, if you will: I am starting a blog. By gods, I am making myself proud today!

What kind of a blog, though? Well, that, as they say, is a topic for another post.

In truth, I have already pretty much written that second post, too, but gather that it is prudent to keep blog posts relatively short, or around couple thousand words at most. (Actually, quite a few bloggers recommend keeping it even shorter, like 600 words max, but that would probably not agree with my temperament at all; with a couple thousand words limit, though, I can live.)

So thanks for reading this virgin post of mine; I’ll be cutting this crap right about n-- ....

Literary References

Brynjolfsson, Erik & McAfee, Andrew (2011). Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. Lexington, Mass: Digital Frontier Press.

Gribbin, John (2002). Science: A History. London: Penguin.

Kivinen, Osmo, Piiroinen, Tero & Saikkonen, Loretta (2016). “Two Viewpoints on the Challenges of ICT in Education: Knowledge-building Theory vs. a Pragmatist Conception of Learning in Social Action.” Oxford Review of Education 42(4). DOI: 10.1080/03054985.2016.1194263.

Wiggins, Jerry S. (ed. 1996). The Five-Factor Model of Personality: Theoretical Perspectives. New York and London: The Guilford Press.