DIGITAL DISTANCING
First off, today marks the day that stupid me finally realised that
there was a keyboard shortcut for pasting selected text into a
terminal window with X. For years I've been wasting time reaching
for the mouse to position and middle-click over the active window,
when all I needed to do was press Shift-Insert! In my defence,
checking now it seems not to be documented in any of the X man
pages except the one for Xterm, so I guess it's just a convention
that later terminal emulators for X generally abide by. The "~Ctrl
~Meta <Btn2Up>" combination (whatever that means) did the same
thing too, apparantly.
Anyway on to my Saturday ramble, the title of which is supposed to
be a twist on social distancing, which as of yesterday there needs
to be slightly less of in my state of Victoria, Australia because
the lockdown has more or less lifted everywhere (just in time for
New South Wales to have a new outbreak because an
unvaccinated/tested limo driver was ferrying international air crew
about and caught the virus off them - yet more quarantine
ineptitude from the government, but can someone please explain why
air crew are riding around town in limos in the first place???).
Ahem, well back on topic. I've been thinking lately that compared
to many people today, I sort-of practice what you could call
"digital distancing". You see the contradiction with me is that I
enjoy messing about with computers and learning about the technical
aspects, but at the same time I haven't adopted them as closely as
most other people, many of whome are completely disinterested in
the technology itself. Smart phones have certainly become the
pointy end of this distinction, especially in the last few weeks
when it became manditory for all retail stores to record each
visiting customer by making them scan a QR-code with their smart
phone*. Instead, as someone who doesn't even carry a phone around
with them, let alone a "smart" one, now I have to fill in a form on
every visit.
But it's not about avoiding certain classes of devices, it's all
about the usage cases. My laptop, for example, goes with me a lot
as a practical measure for running my online business when away
from home, and for doing big downloads from places with better
internet connections than I can get at home. But if I'm just going
for a drive or some other pure pleasure trip, I'll never take it.
In a way I wouldn't even want it in the car even if I didn't use it
(I have considered this more often lately when thinking about
writing a phlog post during one of my day trips), I wan't to be
physically separated from its capabilities. Instead last time I
took a notepad, but I didn't use it anyway - I did think of things
to say but didn't feel the need to say them. Perhaps not needing to
say what you're thinking is one of the best parts of travelling
alone? The journey shouldn't be interpreted until its finished, and
you've finished shaping it.
It's not just the communication aspects either, but I do like
isolation. That's why I don't use a satnav either, even now that
people are giving them to me due to smart phones and cars having
them built-in (shame I never can be bothered finding an interesting
hack for them). On one hand I don't like having it decide the route
in the first place, and even as a teenager before I got a car I had
plans for building a PC into whatever vehicle I ended up with that
could run some free GPS routing software which was more to my taste
(as well as "media centre" sort of stuff, mainly for playing
tracker modules). But when I grew up and bought a satnav-less car
of my own, I immediately appreciated the isolation of having to
rely on printed maps. I've ended up now with an extensive
collection of maps for the whole country sequentially covering
reduced areas in more detail, all carried around with me everywhere
just in case I decide to make a (currently illegal) break for the
Northern Territory or some other unlikely slice of the country.
I do consequently spend a lot of time sort-of half-lost, vagely
aware of the town I'll end up in if these road signs continue to
_not_ say the road I'm looking for (which turns out to have been
called by a different name on the sign, or the road I'm on already
diverted onto it without me noticing, etc.). But really I like that
it's up to me, and not some string of technology tied to the
goodwill of a foreign power. Besides as a last resort I've got a
compass which I can always "connect" to the Earth's built-in global
navigation system.
At home too I've got at least one place that's sacred and forbidden
to my laptop, not as a conscious rule that I decided on one day,
but again just the way that I'm comfortable with my "digital
distance". That place is my bedroom, where I'm fine with books and
even print-outs of articles found on the web, but to use my laptop
there would just be "wrong". But I have, or at least had, one
permitted computer in the form of a mid-80s 8086 luggable PC.
Running MS-DOS V. 3, it's fun for playing Tetris, writing
documents, or messing around with the database program installed in
the 90s for one of its previous lives cataloging exhibits at a
small museum. I did write a phlog post on it one night, but
unfortunately its old 20MB HDD died when I went to save it (going
into one of those endless MS-DOS "(a)bort, (r)etry, (i)gnore?"
prompts that reappeared after every option - MS-DOS 3.3 or above
might have saved me by offering the "(f)ail" option), so that post
is lost and the HDD hasn't got going again since.
In a way I actually dislike the idea of physically restricting my
access to technology. It seems like an admission of mental weakness
- that I should have the willpower to restrict my own usage of
technology however I wish without needing physical barriers in
place. Also there are things like social media that I avoid easily
and completely even with them reachable whenever I have access to a
modern web browser. But nevertheless in these cases keeping a
distance from technology actually promotes a different way of
thinking for me, perhaps a forced contentment with myself and my
surroundings. Contentment with the real world - distanced from
complex technological illusions.
Alex Schroeder got at it in an inadvertent, negative, sort of way
with his recent phlog post "The Smartphone Camera". Cameras are
another example of my digital distancing because I insist on film
photography for any purpose that isn't purely practical, but it's
this last paragraph that really interests me:
"Practically all the pictures I share on Mastodon
(@
[email protected]) are made with the smartphone. It takes
too much time to wait until they're transferred to the laptop,
processed there, and sent to the phone. The immediacy of being
somewhere, taking pictures, and posting about the experience is
lost."
gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02021-06-17_The_Smartphone_Camera
Besides confirming again that this Mastodon thing isn't for me,
this mindset is the antithesis of how I want to think when I'm out
somewhere. He gets his thrill from sharing and participating in
some secondary social construct spanning the omnipresent web of
technology, connecting himself beyond the physical reality of his
surroundings. On the other hand when I'm out I like to revel in my
own isolation, knowing and caring only about that where I am, or
imagining the rest. I don't want distant people to have any part in
that.
Of the two of us I know that I'm the weirdo here, there's ample
evidence that most people do prefer to "share the moment" over the
internet one way or other. Still I think that some people might
appreciate a bit more digital distancing in their lives, at least
if society was more open to it.
- The Free Thinker.
* A more universal approach to this, privacy issues still aside,
would have been to provide every person with their own QR-code (eg.
mailed out) and have the stores scan that. Then the burden isn't on
every single person to have a smart phone (and one new enough to
run the app, which of course isn't a barrier that they've tried
very hard to keep low).
PS I was complaining a while ago about how the cost for building a
proper quarantine centre (COVID-safe limos presumably not
included), with the "cabins" to be built for isolated accomodation
costing $200,000 each, and the federal government has finally
agreed to fund that now. I saw an ad the other day for a company in
Melbourne building "tiny houses" out of shipping containers -
bathroom, kitchenette, air conditioning, and a place for a bed, all
the features of the cheap high-rise hotel rooms that they're using
at the moment: $32,000 each, and economies of scale would no doubt
drop that further for building a whole bunch of them. Seriously
what is $200,000 going towards? Well I know the answer of course -
straight into someone's pocket, just like every other
government-funded construction project.
