It’s inevitable: it’s all going digital. How soon I’m not so sure, but that’s just a detail. However, legal and financial wrangling aside (a little hobby horse of mine), there is something I’m going to miss about having an object to hold and cherish. This really struck home the other night when I was playing Jonathan Blow’s Braid which recently came out on PC (long after its Xbox release). I fell for it in no time and felt it was so seamlessly created, such a complete package, that it just cried out to be lavishly wrapped up in a bespoke, tactile package. The reality is that it came in cold hard bits that for one reason or another I find much harder to cherish. There’s definitely a risk of sounding exactly like vinyl lovers do when talking about CDs and banging on about the artwork and that’s something I’m keen to avoid, so I’m not going to wax nostalgic about the way PC games used to be packaged because let’s face it they were packaged like crap. Needlessly huge and cumbersome boxes gave way to impersonal plastic DVD boxes with ever diminishing manuals; the closest we get to object fetish now is brushed aluminium ‘Steelbooks’ – which I suppose is nice but it seems like too little too late. When Braid whispered in my ear about reification, images came to mind of folded card embossed with patterns, a rainbow of matte colours, a notable absence of child-like, techno-hip, jumbo fonts yelling the title out and a distinct lack of bullet-pointed product feature list on the back.

I’m not a fanatic collector or rabid object fetishist, but I do wonder about my tastes. Am I outdated? Is this something I’ll grow out of? Or is holding things, touching things, something that humans won’t escape? Maybe it’s to do with ownership I suppose, in that we might sub-consciously equate being able to hold something as having the power and control over it and confirming our ownership of it – having the object there permanently is irrevocable proof. But I wonder if that attitude is the same for the next generation that has grown up with digital ‘possessions’ (for lack of a better word)? Do they still equate physical possession with ownership? Do they even think of ownership in the same way? The shift from vinyl to compact disc was a minor step, updating and modernising without really changing the premise, but the shift from hard-copy to digital is a whole new paradigm as you can’t hold it and it doesn’t even have a package! Thinking about it, I have become attached to certain box-less programs I use and that feels similarly warm and fuzzy. Maybe it’s even purer as I’m not swayed by fancy packaging. In any case, it will be interesting to look back in ten, twenty, thirty years and see how far we’ve come (or not as the case may be). Will the digital revolution be utter and complete or will we still continue to lovingly weigh ourselves down with objects?

The Wider Implications of Humble Spell-checking

We all know auto-correct from word processors: “should i?” becomes “Should I?” without me doing a thing. So should I bother writing a capital I at all when a lower-case one will do fine?

Now at this point in time there’s plenty of programs that still don’t auto-correct you, so you do still need to know your grammar, but less and less is handwritten. Calculators – in one form or another – are pretty much ubiquitous these days too, and people rely on these more and more to do even their basic maths for them. Adobe Dreamweaver is another example in which the software will do all the coding for you, so why bother learning it?

Even if we do know how to do something initially, continual use of machine automation makes us lazy and our knowledge becomes dusty and rusty. I’m not sure we would actually lose the knowledge entirely, but I can see issues like that arising in the near future as we become increasingly computerised. However, this poses the question of why bother to properly learn something in the first place if you not actually going to use it?

This has been going on for a long time though, we use things every day, even though we don’t understand how they work. Take the oven for example: a replacement for the simple cooking fire that many people would not know how to light (other than those with misspent youths), let alone explain how an actual oven works, because they don’t need to. Knowing how everything you use works is frankly a ludicrous idea and really defeats many benefits of living in a cooperative society full of specialised people. However, take the Dreamweaver scenario: what if you left the HTML and CSS entirely to the software makers and just designed using the tool in hand without any understanding of how it worked? Not too ridiculous, though possibly problematic. What about the same for maths? Leave it up to the people who make calculator software to get that right, just like we might leave the maintenance of our car up to a mechanic.

That probably sounds like a nasty diatribe on the perils of machines, as if I’m about to proclaim a Butlerian Jihad of sorts, so here’s the other side: why waste time labouring over something that a machine can do for you? Machines are designed to increase efficiency, to save us time and effort that could be better spent doing the bits machine/tools can’t do. Web designers can spend more time designing and less time coding, and if we ignore the obvious benefits that has then why bother with any tools at all? We wouldn’t be where we are now without these tools as they have become specialised beyond a humanly reproducible level.

Modern life has embraced physical labour-saving devices so whole-heartedly that we are constantly told that we need must regularly exercise and many of us now have to go out of our way to do basic exercise (gyms etc.) in order to stay healthy. It seems that maybe many of us are saving ourselves so much physical labour that in fact we’re not doing enough! In the realm of knowledge the internet raises an issue of similar scale: when the Internet eventually becomes ever-present on-demand (e.g. smart-phones are getting there), why would you learn something that you can Google in five seconds? I’m not being facetious here either, if you really can look it up in five seconds, then really, what IS the point of learning it? The rapid increase in technology is accelerating our abstraction from previously everyday tasks. While this has been indeed been going on forever, are we about to reach breaking point? Or is this just cultural evolution?

So: should i? Or should I not?