the tindog coffeehouse

I’m blogging my way through From the Garden to the City: The Redeeming and Corrupting Power of Technology by John Dyer. Dyer began the book by trying to put technology in its proper perspective. Technology, he argues, isn’t neutral. As it changes over time, we change with it. What we view as new and futuristic today becomes normal (or “mythic”) to future generations, to the point where we no longer even think of it as technology.

Imagination.

In Chapter 2, he builds upon this point by looking at exactly what technology is, defining it in terms of a narrative:

Though we might not realize it, we compose these mininarratives whenever we encounter even the simplest gadget. If we happen to see a shovel, our minds can easily imagine the act of digging a hole, visualizing how the ground will look after we’re finished. This small effort of the imagination has a clear movement from beginning (the world before the shovel) to middle (the act of digging) to end (the world with a new hole)—the basic arc of any story. …

Technology, then, is the bridge from this world to the imagined one.

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Don’t call Google+ a social network.

Even though its users have profiles, follow others, post status updates, upload photos and videos, and “+1″ a bunch of stuff.

But don’t call it a social network.

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I hate Walmart. I detest it. I hate everything about it. I hate the parking lot. I hate that the medicine and toiletries section is on the complete opposite side of the store as everything else you need. I hate that even if you’re just running in for five things, you still have to get a full-size cart because you can never find a handbasket. I hate that they have 78 checkout lanes, but only two are open at any given time. And I hate that if you use the self-checkout lane, there’s a 99.9% chance something won’t work, and you’ll have to wait around for ten minutes for a worker to come by and enter a random code that you probably could’ve entered yourself.

And yet I still shop there.

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Website Hunch.com recently published a large and detailed infographic comparing Mac and PC users, based on questions answered by visitors to the site. The non-scientific study, which was republished on a few other tech blogs, basically confirms every stereotype about Mac and PC users: that Mac users are young, liberal, artsy-fartsy types, while PC users are old, conservative, spreadsheet fanatics.

I don’t know how much of that is actually true. Instinctively, I suppose it’s fairly accurate just based on the kind of image Apple has spent decades cultivating. Apple has always wanted us to see it as the anti-Microsoft, even going back to their infamous “1984″ commercial. But one area of the infographic that I think is entirely wrong is the Technology category, and more specifically this stat:

Mac people are 21% more likely than PC people to consider themselves computer-savvy gearheads.

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Source.

Previously:
It’s the end of the Internet as we know it (and I feel fine)
Welcome to the future
Can you hear me now?
Vanity Fair’s history of the Internet

Gizmodo has a post out about what Microsoft’s successor to Windows 7 will look like. Pretty much anyone you talk to will mention the same things: more cloud integration, better hardware management, better security, faster boot time, expanded use of virtualization, etc. All good answers, and I think accurate ones.

But my gut tells me that if you really want to know what Windows 8 will look like, just look at an iPad. Forget Windows XP, Vista, or even Windows 7. Windows 8 will more closely resemble Apple’s iOS or Google’s Chrome OS than any of its predecessors.

Why? Several reasons:

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