7 Living Artifacts And Why They Are Done For

This is a little tongue-in-cheek, on purpose, but it is also thought-provoking.

Perhaps we are not there yet, but in 5 years it will be completely correct. Power outages are keeping some of the older, analog technologies surviving on the back burner (FM radio, landline phone).

This will also happen in waves - technology pioneers first, middle-class folks in industrialized countries next, the youngsters, of course, and then the rest.

The developing world is a special case - in some cases they HAVE to use outdated tech due to unreliable source of electrical power, lack of infrastructure, etc., while in others they can skip decades of technological development and adopt the most current one (skipping landlines altogether and adopting cell phones instead is already happening in Africa).

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I think it's closer than 5 years. Already I don't use any of those except the phone -- and we only have that because of a package deal with our internets, and we never answer it because the ringer is turned off.

I did not throw away my CDs but I am not buying new ones. My car has a CD player so I use it sometimes. I do not have my own personal iPod (but there is a "house" one and the rest of the family have their own). But this will change soon.

Radio - do not have the satellite one yet, and I listen to NPR in the car. Good for traffic/weather alerts. And this will change soon.

Landline phone is good when the power goes out. It is also the number to give to people you don't care about - debt collectors ;-) - so you can screen calls. I do not pick up that one unless I hear a voice of someone I really want to talk to at that very moment. It also comes as part of a deal with internet and cable.

I rarely use fax any more.

Cable - mostly for kids' programming. C-Span every four years when it comes close to the election day.

That's about it. I will probably get to 100% of that article within about a year. Guesstimate.

The article doesn't take technophobes into account. There are lots of people who don't use computers or the Internet although it's anybody's guess whether there are enough of them to make these living artifacts cost-effective.

This is equivalent to what Matt Heath said in an earlier comment:

"Town-criers still exist, but since the printing press and wide spread literacy they aren't the force they used to be."

The same goes for any technology - there will always be devoted slide-rule users, but they will not be the majority of the society.

Unfortunately, there's also an economic bias at work. Not everybody can afford a computer with Internet access and public access terminals are hard to get at. The electronic have-nots risk being shut out of public debate altogether. Considering they represent a significant voting bloc, that could be bad news for democracy.

hypocritical author - "cds are old, get vinyl"

Also, many of the points may or may not come to pass in the future - I would have expected much of it to have already happened, but we still don't have our flying cars.

By anonymous (not verified) on 15 Dec 2008 #permalink

I agree about the print YellowPages; they are utterly useless, and the indexing and organization appear to have been outsourced to meth-addled squirrels. Some of the new technologies are indeed much greener than the old analog versions, but I'm just not ready to give up my books for a Kindle, or to rush off to the computer when I want a recipe from Cooking Light. I can certainly see how a Kindle is a wonderful thing for a friend who travels a lot on business, but me, I like the tactile and olfactory experience of a book. Also, as Edward Tufte points out, no computer screen can yet match the resolution of print.

I have a number of friends and acquaintances who work in agriculture, or with livestock and other animals, and they all listen to AM/FM radio. None of them carries an iPod or a computer. I think there are a lot of people who aren't in academic or white-collar desk jobs, who listen to the radio while working. I plan to keep my car for another few years, until it's at least 10 years old, and I use the radio and the CD player all the time. Commercial radio is crap, I agree, but many of the university-run stations are interesting, as is Pacifica radio.