Poor Blu-ray. Barely has it even made consumer-technology status (i.e., affordable to the average-wage earner) and already a new data storage format is threatening to send it the way of the laser disc. Apprently, Australian researchers are making headway in the development of an insanely gluttonous disc that will reportedly hold 1.6 freakin' terabytes of data! To put this in perspective, that's the equivalent of about 10,000 DVDs. Bitchin', no doubt. But somehow I have to ask: what the hell would an average person do with all that storage space?
I'm no anti-techie; in fact I'm a bit of a gadget junkie myself. But seriously, we all should step back for a second and take a good look at this obsession with all things mega, giga and tera. Just a few years ago, 40-gigabyte hard drives were considered monster-size storage; now a whole terabyte doesn't seem to be big enough for our needs. Not so long ago, we couldn't stop counting the stuff we could do with a 2-GHz processor; now the only way we'll be happy with such is if it came in dual-core configuration. Eight-gigabyte iPods used to make us happy, now we're complaining that 32 gigs can't keep up with our immensely vast (and growing) range of tastes in entertainment.
The truth is digital technology is a double-edged sword. By design, it's supposed to be the faithful buttler to all of mankind--its basic job is to assist us in speeding up our day-to-day chores, so that we can have more time to be well-rounded human beings. But as the dark side of human nature goes, what technology has actually done is fuel our primal greed and condone our inherent laziness. Case in point: in my earlier days in advertising, clients were willing to wait a day or two for the agency to conceptualize and design an ad for him. And then he was happy to see a fairly raw sketch of the ad with doodles to indicate where the text should be, and read the actual copy on a separate sheet of dot-matrix print-out. Today you have clients giving a telegraphic brief via SMS, and demanding to see a good-as-final artwork in two hours. Oh, and did I mention that the ad has already been booked to come out in tomorrow's newspapers?
Theoretically the logic should be simple: if you can do in 4 hours what used to take 8, that means you have 4 extra hours to enjoy life--say, spend quality time with your kids, or build real (not professionally symbiotic) relationships with associates. The reality, however, is nothing less than twisted: if you can do in 4 hours what used to take 8, then there's no reason why you can't do it in 2--in which case you'll free-up 6 hours to do three more things that used to take 8 hours each. Throw in the multitasking crap, and the result is a culture of perpetual cramming and sloppy planning disguised as "productivity." From the moment ancient man developed the concept of owning possessions, it has always been our nature to want more as we acquire more. The infinite scalability of digital technology simply provided us with the proverbial carrot on a stick.
And what of our over-dependence on these two lowest-value numbers, 0 and 1? How many people do you know who can blurt out their own phone numbers as effortlessly as if it were muscle memory? When was the last time you planned a meeting with a friend without saying, "I'll text you when I'm in the area"? In the pre-computer days, copywriters and art directors would begin work by grabbing a pencil and a sketchpad, and toss ideas to and from each other with their brains in high gear. These days, the norm is to turn on your Mac (it's gotta be a Mac, otherwise you ain't creative at all), get online and hope that the Internet would throw a brilliant idea your way. Apparently, machines have gotten so smart now that on most days we simply don't see the need to use our heads anymore.
Even our leisurely pursuits have not been spared. Gone are the days when people made a conscious, split-second, on-the-spot decision on whether or not a particular moment is worth capturing on film. So is the practice of choosing your cruising music before you get in the car and drive away. These days, we just don't bother anymore with these mundane acts of mental calisthenics. After all, there's more than enough memory in our storage cards--NOT!
Still, to be fair to those guys gestating the mammoth memory disc, I honestly don't think it was anyone's intention to turn us into overly wound-up lazy-brains. It was us--the users of the technollogy--who went and missed the whole point. So how about pausing for a moment to regain our bearings, huh, digital-age dudes?
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